'I've never felt so betrayed': MAHA disillusionment hits high gear

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission event, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 22, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump is losing his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) supporters, the health-conscious predominantly female coalition that backed the 2024 third-party presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) before Kennedy endorsed Trump. But that was before Trump turned on issues like banning dangerous pesticides.

“Tricia Busch, a former elementary schoolteacher in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa, is among the MAHA voters who say they will vote for the person, not the party,” reported The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who specializes in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Health Again movement, on Thursday. “Ms. Busch, 35, has three young children and is a two-time cancer survivor. She is now in remission from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the same blood cancer at issue in the Supreme Court case. She blames exposure to glyphosate in Iowa, a farming state.”

Busch, who initially supported Kennedy in 2024 despite being a registered Democrat because she believed he would hold big companies accountable, now feels disappointed.

“I really had faith in him and this whole MAHA,” Busch told Stolberg. “I thought he was speaking to people like me, who feel like we’re slowly being poisoned, and we’re waking up to what the big companies are doing to us.”

Yet Busch felt “betrayed” by Kennedy’s support for a Trump executive order making it easier for pesticide companies to use glyphosate, a chemical linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma and endocrine disruption.

“The only thing that matters is action,” Zen Honeycutt, who founded Moms Across America, told Stolberg. “Not a political party.” Likewise Leslie Manookian, a former Wall Street executive founded the anti-vaccine Health Freedom Defense Fund and works as a homeopath, denounced MAHA to Stolberg by saying that “I don’t think it’s led by anybody. It’s a populist, grass roots movement.”

Vani Hari, a wellness personality known as “The Food Babe” online, told the Times that “it’s very hard to support a movement that is labeled MAHA when two opposing things are happening at the same time. It’s like, ‘Yes, we can eat all the real food we want, but it’s covered in Roundup.’ ”

As Hari mentioned, pesticide companies like Roundup use glyphosate, a chemical that critics like the International Agency for Research on Cancer claim is carcinogenic.When Trump signed an executive order calling for increased domestic production of glyphosate, he disregarded that RFK Jr. himself had served as a plaintiff in a successful $289 million lawsuit against Roundup’s previous manufacturer, Monsanto.

"Lack of access to glyphosate-based herbicides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system," Trump argued in a statement defending his executive order. He was not the only administration official to express that position.

“Donald Trump’s executive order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply,” Kennedy himself said in his own statement. “We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

Despite believing Trump would oppose glyphosate in his second term, Trump sided with chemical manufacturers and gutted regulations during his first term. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2022, Amy van Saun, a senior attorney with Center for Food Safety, alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “pesticide division, led by Jess Rowland, colluded with Monsanto [which is linked with Bayer] to undermine the [International Agency for Research on Cancer]’s determination, and as the Court found, ignored experts from EPA’s own science division, the Office of Research and Development.

According to a study that same year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 80 percent of Americans have glyphosate in their urine. The study examined 2,310 urine samples, one-third of them from children between the ages of six and 18, and found that 1,885 individuals had urine laced with glyphosate.

While MAHA mothers are horrified by statistics like this, that does not mean they will turn to the Democrats. Anecdotal evidence does suggest, however, that they are abandoning the Republicans.

“They have nowhere to go,” conservative young wellness podcaster Alex Clark, who works for the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s organization Turning Point U.S.A., told the Times. “They feel like their vote is useless. They have lost the energy. They have lost the enthusiasm. They feel like the Democrats don’t care about them. They feel like the Republicans lied to them, and they’re not planning on voting.”

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