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It was a bad week for the Make America Healthy Again movement.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting the production of glyphosate, the chemical that powers the weed killer Roundup and a longtime target of the MAGA faithful. Glyphosate has also long been one of the main targets of the MAHA movement, which considers it a dangerous carcinogen poisoning the country. (Experts say that the pesticide’s danger to the public is minimal, but the scientific community is not in agreement about its health effects.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself took on Monsanto, Roundup’s manufacturer, in a successful 2018 case accusing the company of knowing that the chemical caused cancer. In 2024 he called glyphosate “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and promised to ban it.

So what did the head of the Trump administration’s health department have to say about it now? “Donald Trump’s executive order puts America first where it matters most—our defense readiness and our food supply,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

It was a near echo of what Trump himself said when he declared glyphosate necessary to keeping the food supply chain steady and therefore “crucial to military readiness and national defense.” The president’s executive order, invoking a 1950s law meant for national security emergencies, creates the legal basis for glyphosate producers to be shielded from lawsuits and authorizes the Department of Agriculture to compel those companies to produce the pesticide.

To critics, Kennedy’s endorsement seemed like a confounding betrayal. He and the other most high-placed members of his coalition—the doctors who sit on panels and guide policy—stayed quiet as the MAHA moms were dealt a serious defeat.

It was a shock to the movement’s system. Alex Clark, a MAHA podcast host with Turning Point USA, wrote on social media that she started........

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