Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally.Mother Jones illustration; Michael M. Santiago/Getty

“Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked a roaring crowd, during Sunday’s triumphal rally in support of Trump at Madison Square Garden.

When Kennedy, the country’s most famous anti-vaccine activist, suspended his campaign to endorse Donald Trump, it not only represented the death of his presidential aspirations, but the dawn of something new: the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a tidy bit of sloganeering designed to highlight where Trump and Kennedy’s agendas overlap.

“How can you claim this is going to make people healthy?”

The concept is meant to convince skeptical Kennedy supporters to back Trump. But so far it’s mainly illustrated the various ways Kennedy is on board with Trump’s radical deregulation agenda, which would see the agencies responsible for policing food, environmental and medication safety defunded.

After all, the ex-president has done it before: Trump came into office pledging to make huge cuts to scientific and medical research. Under his administration, the FDA took fewer enforcement actions against companies suspected of marketing dangerous, unsafe, or ineffective products, and cuts to public health agencies may have harmed the country’s readiness to respond to COVID.

There are signs that another Trump administration will be even worse for public health: Project 2025, an agenda for his second administration prepared by his allies, calls for the CDC to be broken up, slamming it as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It also demonizes the National Institutes of Health, claiming the agency has an “incestuous relationship” with vaccine manufacturers and is in the grip of “woke gender ideology.”

Despite his governing record, Trump has adopted some MAHA talking points, promising to end the “chronic illness epidemic” in America, which, like Kennedy, he has previously........

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