MAHA’s Big Breakup

Trump promised purity, delivered glyphosate, and the crunchy coalition discovered what “America First” is actually made of.

They came bearing vibes and vacuum sealed pouches of certainty, they came with Instagram fonts and a mission statement that could fit on the back of a mason jar label, they came to Make America Healthy Again, which is not a policy platform so much as a mood board, an aesthetic of purification, a cleansing ritual performed in the comments section, or maybe a long exhale after the long inhale of modern life, and they came because in a country where everything is processed, litigated, and monetized, the idea of purity still sells, especially when it is marketed as motherhood, as vigilance, as love, as the right to look at a barcode and feel a moral superiority rising like steam from a cup of bone broth.

And then Trump, who can smell a market segment the way a shark can smell a panic attack, decided he could put this movement on a leash, like a designer doodle with a political donation page, and RFK Jr., who has always treated public health like a stage where he can deliver a monologue against unseen villains, decided he could be the movement’s high priest, the man in the linen tunic holding up the sacrament, the man who could say “toxins” and make the crowd swoon, because “toxins” is a word that turns fear into glamour, it is the Rosetta Stone of wellness paranoia, and also, importantly, it is non-specific enough to be shouted in any direction without ever requiring the speaker to name a dose, a mechanism, or a peer-reviewed study.

The deal, implicit and delicious, was that everyone would get what they wanted, Trump would get a fresh troupe of devotees who looked less like the standard-issue culture-war uncle and more like the school pickup line, the sourdough mom with a Stanley cup full of electrolytes, the granola dad who says he is “just asking questions” while buying a second freeze dryer, and RFK Jr. would get an institutional megaphone, a federal title, a solemn seal to frame behind him as he talked about what “they” are doing to our bodies, and the MAHA crowd would get the thrill of being courted by power, the intoxicating sensation that the government might finally validate their group chat, might finally elevate their suspicion into doctrine.

Except the problem with recruiting people through obsession is that obsession comes with its own rules, and the problem with selling outrage as a lifestyle is that lifestyles require consistency, and the problem with making a movement out of “think of the children” is that, every so often, the children have to actually be thought of, not as rhetorical props, not as a moral shield, but as small humans who eat food and touch grass and exist in a world where the word “chemical” is not a curse but a description.

So when Trump signed an executive order that treated glyphosate not as a cultural villain but as a strategic asset, when the Defense Production Act got invoked like a magic spell, when the administration began speaking the language of national security and supply chains and critical inputs, the MAHA faithful did what faithful people do when their gods start reading from a different scripture, they panicked, they posted, they accused, they mourned, and they tried to translate the betrayal into their existing cosmology, because for them glyphosate is not just an herbicide, it is the symbol of everything they believe is wrong with modern life, it is the chemical shorthand for corruption, sickness, and the gnawing sense that something unseen is always slipping into the body, into the bread, and into the baby.

This is the part where the political strategists, the ones who love to say “coalition,” discover what happens when a coalition is built out of conspiratorial hobbies rather than shared material interests, because it turns out you cannot keep a movement together by validating everyone’s fears until you need them to accept one fear as less important than another fear, and it turns out you cannot take a community that has spent years talking about pesticides as if they are demons and then ask them to treat pesticides as if they are patriots, and it turns out you cannot tell a mom who has memorized the ingredient list of crackers like it is scripture that she should calm down because the chemical company profits are, in this one special case, in alignment with the republic.

Trump, of course, does not do irony, he does not do repentance, he does not do the tender little dance where a politician admits he has wronged the people who believed in him, he does sales, dominance, and the kind of blunt sincerity that is not sincerity at all but a refusal to explain, and so the White House does what it always does when the vibes wobble, it insists this is not about glyphosate, it is about phosphorus, it is about defense readiness, it is about semiconductors, it is about the abstract threats of a world where hostile actors control critical inputs, and maybe all of that is true, maybe you cannot run a modern nation on vibes alone, maybe you cannot feed a country without the chemical scaffolding of industrial agriculture, maybe the world really is a chessboard where inputs matter, but the MAHA movement did not sign up for chess, it signed up for exorcism, and you cannot ask an exorcist to admire the demon’s supply chain.

RFK Jr. is the more interesting figure here, because he is not just a salesman, he is a man who wants to be believed, who wants the tragic grandeur of the prophet, who wants to position himself as the rare insider who tells the truth about the system, and now he has to do the classic Washington pivot, the pivot from crusader to custodian, from the man who swore he would ban the practice of desiccating wheat with glyphosate to the man who says, in a statement polished for television, that national security comes first because all our priorities depend on it, and the pivot is so sharp you can hear the bones of the internet cracking.

The irony is that the MAHA movement, which is easy to mock because it contains multitudes of nonsense, is also animated by something real, which is that parents are not wrong to be anxious, they live in a country where the institutions have repeatedly asked for trust and then squandered it, where corporations have repeatedly promised safety and then paid settlements, where regulators speak in cautious language and the public hears only the part that sounds like permission, and so the wellness moms do what humans always do when they feel powerless, they take control of what they can, they filter water, they swap out pantry items, and they build a small shrine of rules around the fragile bodies they love.

This is why the attempt to “play them” was always going to fail eventually, because you can manipulate a crowd that wants a villain, you can flatter a crowd that wants to feel chosen, you can absorb a crowd that wants to be seen, but you cannot indefinitely manipulate a crowd whose core identity is caretaking, because caretaking has an endpoint, it has a test that cannot be spun forever, and the test is whether the world you are building seems safer for the people they tuck into bed at night.

And glyphosate, fairly or unfairly, is their acid test, their shibboleth, their bright red line, and when the administration crossed it, the masks slipped, not because the MAHA crowd suddenly became rational, not because they suddenly discovered the FDA, or because they decided they trust science now, but because they recognized the oldest political trick in the book, which is that powerful men will happily borrow your moral language until it gets in the way of their real loyalties, and then they will tell you, with a straight face, that you misheard them, that you overreacted, or that you should be grateful to be included.

So now the movement is in open revolt, with influencers saying they are speechless, with organizers begging to know how they are supposed to rally women to vote red in the midterms, with moms threatening to turn this car around, and it is almost sweet, the way it reveals that even in the most meme-soaked corners of American politics, there remains a stubborn residue of human motive, which is love, fear, and the daily work of caring for children in an economy that makes care feel like a private luxury.

Trump thought he could get them because he thought they were just another faction, another set of angry consumers looking for a brand to attach to, and RFK Jr. thought he could keep them because he thought his charisma would cover the contradictions, but the contradiction is too bright, too chemical, and too specific, because you can talk people into hating “toxins” forever, but you cannot talk them into loving the toxin they already named, not when their whole mission, crazed and sincere and frequently absurd, still contains the one standard that refuses to be negotiated, which is that the story has to end with the kids being okay.