When Donald Trump took the stage in Florida at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday to deliver a declaration of victory, he promised his gathered supporters “the golden age of America” in his return to the White House. You may be surprised at the number of white women with babies on their hips, front-facing cameras trained on their highlighted cheekbones, nodding right along with him on their social media accounts–but only if you haven’t familiarized yourself with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again, MAHA for short, a “health plan” custom-fit to appeal to those who proudly brand themselves as free-thinking mamas and boss babes. Hey girl, we’re gonna make America healthy again!
“We’re the party of common sense,” Trump said in that speech. And that common sense apparently means letting Kennedy, his former Republican Party rival, “go wild” with the nation’s healthcare policies. Kennedy, an on-the-record anti-vaxxer, has boasted about his brain being partially eaten by a worm that left him with both short-term and long-term memory loss among other cognitive effects—and that he’d eat five more and still be chill “with a six-worm handicap.”
“He’s going to help make America healthy again,” Trump said of Kennedy, the man he accused as recently as May of being an undercover Democrat in cahoots with President Joe Biden to fulfil a radical leftist agenda. “He’s a great guy and he really means that he wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it.” During his rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump teased the news of this new health czar, saying, “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.”
Right-leaning social media influencers like Jessica Reed Kraus, who posts endless typo-riddled Instagram stories under the handle @houseinhabit, and their merry bands of wine moms and girl bosses have long waited for this moment: Validation that they, too, can “go wild on medicines,” no matter how many lives it puts in danger. Should Kennedy be instated to this unnamed high-ranking public health role (both he and Trump have waffled about what the position would actually be, but Kennedy seems to be participating in the time-honored far-right tradition of saying something absolutely insane a whole bunch of times and hoping that makes it true, presto change-o), his intention is to dismantle and privatize the foundations of public health initiatives.
When Kennedy dropped his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump, he launched his MAHA initiative, rebranding himself as both a Trump Guy and a Health Guy in one fell swoop.
According to the associated PAC’s website, which sells branded hats (this party adores a hat), the key to health lies in “health freedom” and “removing harmful toxins from our food, water, and air.”
In an interview with NPR, Kennedy said that on day one of Trump’s second administration, he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. “Now we have fluoride in toothpaste,” he said, conveniently skimming over people who might not have access to toothpaste, even as he later displayed remarkable flexibility bending over backwards to rationalize Republicans as “the party of the American poor.”
Left unsaid in that interview: His past assertions (plural) that the chemicals in tap water are making kids gay and trans. His talking points lately have leaned more on his also-false beliefs that fluoride causes arthritis, bone fractures, and bone cancer. Kennedy would like to be in charge of medical research in this mystical role, because, see, he’s done his own.
While speaking with NPR, Kennedy also said he’d work “immediately” on changes to vaccine regulations and research, disingenuously explaining, “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody. We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety, particularly has huge deficits and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
This is where Kennedy links arms with all those earth mamas and wellness influencers who “did their own research” and “made the right choice for their families”: Saying that he’s not going to “take vaccines away” does not mean policy couldn’t make them much harder to obtain. And by loosening requirements to vaccinate children, leading to lower adoption rates, vaccines become less effective at preventing disease and needless death. That research that Kennedy and the influencers did apparently did not include reading up on herd immunity and the role that individual accountability plays in community well-being.
