How gaga is MAHA?
When Michelle Obama suggested in 2010 that American children should eat less junk food, it triggered outrage in conservative circles. “Get your damn hands off my fries, lady,” Glenn Beck, then a Fox anchor, told his audience, adding that “if I want to be a fat-fat fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice.” Right-wing commentators criticised “food-police” overreach. Within months of Donald Trump becoming president in 2017, his administration said it would roll back some of the healthy school-lunch requirements (it failed).
The idea that Americans should be free to eat whatever they want, that the government has no business in their fridges, and that companies should be able to make money with as few regulatory hurdles as possible, has long been core to Republicanism. But “make America healthy again” (MAHA), championed by Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health, challenges these orthodoxies. Indeed, his merry band of followers is anything but orthodox. The latest to join is Dr Mehmet Oz, a star known for promoting pseudoscience and having psychics on his tv show, who has been nominated to lead the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which provides health coverage for nearly half of Americans.
If confirmed, Mr Kennedy will be responsible for leading 13 agencies, including CMS, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He would be in charge of managing national health crises, from the current opioid epidemic to a future pandemic, and will have power to direct the agencies’ priorities. Putting a vaccine-sceptic conspiracy theorist in charge of the country’s health policy, and the largest department in terms of federal budget, is nutty. Yet underneath the tinfoil hat Mr Kennedy—who calls ultra-processed foods “poison” and waxes lyrical about regenerative farming—advocates some things liberals have long favoured.
In a video promoting MAHA, Mr Kennedy promised that he and Mr Trump would “transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine”. To achieve this, he has pledged to replace “corrupt industry-captured officials” in the health agencies with “honest public servants”, take a tough approach with big business, use government regulation to ban harmful substances from food and farming, and support alternative medicine.
MAHA supports interventions which under a Democratic administration would be termed “nanny state”. Mr Kennedy wants to ban pharmaceutical advertisements and has promised to “get [ultra-] processed food out of school lunch immediately.” Calley Means, a rising star in the MAHA movement, recently said that “Michelle Obama was right,” in her efforts to make school lunches healthier. Where most Republicans ridiculed Joe Biden’s efforts to insist on clearer food labels, Mr Kennedy wants much the same.
The MAHA agenda is outspokenly hostile to big business and Mr Kennedy—a former environmental lawyer who successfully sued corporations for using harmful chemicals—makes no secret of his plans to go after Big Pharma, Food and Agriculture. He advocates stricter regulation and has said he wants to eliminate “1,000 ingredients in our food that are banned in Europe”. Although it seems unlikely Mr Trump read the small print on Mr Kennedy, he has (for now) endorsed his criticisms of industry, writing in his nomination announcement that “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies.”
The third and final area where MAHA looks less like traditional conservatism and more like hippy progressivism is in its embrace of alternative medicine and unorthodox approaches to health. Mr Kennedy advocates bringing a range of experimental treatments into the mainstream. He has berated the FDA for “suppressing” alternative therapies, from the kooky to the dangerous, and has suggested Medicaid should cover health food and gym memberships. He wants half of the National Institutes of Health’s research budget to be spent on “preventive, alternative and holistic” treatments. And he wants to legalise psychedelics for therapeutic use—a departure for the party of “Just say no”.
Ultimately, Mr Kennedy will be able to act only at the behest of his boss who, having promised to let the bear-botherer “go wild”, has also sent a few mixed signals about his commitment to MAHA. In a picture posted last weekend by his son, Donald Trump junior, Mr Trump and Mr Kennedy posed with McDonald’s meals and Coca-Cola. The accompanying text read “Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW.” It did not look like a happy meal for Mr Kennedy. ■
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