MAHA Is No Longer Useful to Trump

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement has reshaped the public health debate. But if the coalition behind it begins to fracture, what comes next?

By Tressie McMillan CottomAlexandra Sifferlin and David Wallace-Wells

Produced by Derek Arthur

Is the MAHA movement’s political influence waning? On “The Opinions,” the Times Opinion science editor Alexandra Sifferlin, the columnist and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the Opinion science writer David Wallace-Wells explored this question in a live event at the Brooklyn Public Library. They discussed the impact of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as secretary of health and human services and what a counternarrative to MAHA should look like.

MAHA Is No Longer Useful to Trump

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Alexandra Sifferlin: To start, I thought we would talk about what MAHA is, because it can sometimes be a little hard to define. Is it a grass-roots movement with real political power? Is it branding for R.F.K. Jr.?

I’m curious how you guys think about what MAHA is and what influence it has or doesn’t have. Tressie?

Tressie McMillan Cottom: OK, sure. Let’s start with me. I think the easy answer is yes to everything that you just listed. Much like the MAGA movement overall, what you’ve got is this sort of uneasy alliance of a lot of populist groups with a sprinkling of performative political factions.

And that is exceptionally true with MAHA because there’s a much longer history there of what we call populist health communities. It’s drawing heavily on ecofascism, whatever might be left over of a sort of libertarian environmental movement. I don’t think you can overstate the role of the emergence of the mommy-blogger-to-health-influencer pipeline.

It’s also worth saying — particularly because it’s branded as being a female-heavy section of MAGA: It’s easy to pick out the low-hanging fruit of performative politics and populism — dangerous populism, in fact. But there is also a real thread there of people who have a longstanding, and defensible, position that our health systems and our health ecology does not create the conditions for them to make good, healthful choices.

Now, we may disagree on what ends they then come to, and the conclusions that they draw based on that, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that there is also a real contingent of people for whom health, especially the idea of health, is deeply tied to concerns about the environment and climate change. The climate crisis is, for some people, a single-voting issue. And some of those people also get lumped into MAHA.

Sifferlin: David, what do you think?

David Wallace-Wells: Well, you used the word “branding,” and in my less charitable moments I think of it as a fiction. Because the coalition that I see, which draws on a lot of pre-existing groups — many of whom are full of great conviction and passion — it doesn’t feel to me like a natural or workable political alignment.

What we’ve had is a sort of opportunistic branding, which has made what was maybe eternal, maybe growing, features of the libertarian fringe in America start to draw on some of the frustrations you were talking about: the food system and the failure of the health care system to deliver what Americans want from it. It’s been presented as a political force growing in strength, maybe even sufficient to catapult R.F.K. Jr. to the presidency after Donald Trump is gone — a kind of successor movement, even as it’s also a parallel movement to MAGA.

Cottom: You sound concerned.

Wallace-Wells: If you look around today in 2026, you see how much it really has been revealed to be a fiction. Or, at least, a coalition of convenience full of contradictions, which could not be sustained over the long haul.

Many of the people who R.F.K. brought in have already left the H.H.S. Of those who remain, there are those who believe that medicine has been overregulated in this country, and those who believe that medicine has been underregulated.

There are people who believe that nothing is sufficient to license a drug unless you’ve got a rock-solid, randomized control trial, and people who think that anecdotal evidence should allow you to license any new drug. There are people who think that we should be able to volunteer to take part in a clinical trial. There are people who believe that the world is poisoning us, and then there are people in the administration who are literally poisoning themselves with off-label supplements and meds.

And all of this, to me, suggests some basic fragmentation and fracturing in what seemed a year or so ago to be an ascendant coalition. But on the core point: This is a movement that has been mobilized on behalf of, or I should say against, what was basically settled vaccine science. That’s how most of the country sees its threat — as a threat against vaccines.

I’m left thinking: We passed through this fever dream. We thought that the country had turned against science and public health and vaccines in the aftermath of the pandemic. For some people, that was true. But to the extent that we believe that it was this mass movement that was laying a claim on the American political future, it doesn’t seem to be bearing out.

Sifferlin: Interesting. So just to stick with that vaccine point a little bit, because it is a little hard to make sense of what’s happening — there’s a lot of conflicting threads: We have rising vaccine skepticism. At the same time, we have pockets of measles outbreaks happening in places where they weren’t before.

But as David points out, the vast majority of Americans are still vaccinating their children. A lot of Kennedy’s specific vaccine policies are really unpopular. So it does raise this question: Is what we’re seeing just a social contagion that’s actually just going to be a bit of a blip, or is it the beginning of something potentially really dangerous?

Cottom: I’m afraid this is going to be a theme, but it’s possible that it’s a bit of both. I agree with David that part of what we saw was a mobilization of a message, and not necessarily a political mobilization. And I think especially early on in Trump’s rise to power, those of us who are just not used to politicians being particularly popular were a little slow to realize that there was a difference between a person garnering a lot of attention and someone actually being able to mobilize people.

I don’t think we have any strong evidence that everybody who self-identifies as MAHA, even if they say they voted, that they voted necessarily because of Trump or because of R.F.K. I think the more likely outcome is that you probably have a lot of disaffected voters, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they could be mobilized. I’m not even entirely sure that Trump has ever tried to actually mobilize them in any significant way.

Now they do, however, have an infrastructure to drive a lot of attention, and a lot of media narrative, which I think gave us the impression, especially coming out of Covid — it’s hard, at this point, to overstate the shock that was to our public consciousness. If you’ve got any narrative coming out of an event like that, to help people make sense of it — for a lot of people, it was very difficult to make sense of what was happening.

Especially during a moment when we started to see the fracturing of institutions that had really just atrophied after decades of disinvestment — or they were institutions that people just never really had to think about before, the C.D.C. being a very good example of that. It was easy to mistake the clarity of the message — that conspiratorial: Here’s what they don’t want you to know.

If there is anything that’s holding that group together, it is that underlying sentiment of: I’m unsure about what is happening. There is a lot of change, and there are a lot of unknowns. There is declining trust in our institutions. And what we know — from just about every conspiracy that has ever captured the public imagination — is that a message of clarity will solve that problem for people.

For a lot of people, if you tell them: This is what they don’t want you to know — there were many individuals who were able to use that to leverage, again, attention, and political proximity in some cases. But that is not a very good framing for turning things into actual policy, which is one of the reasons why I think we see pretty ineffective, or chaotic, policy-making based on MAHA’s agenda — to the extent that they have a single agenda. To David’s point, a lot of it is very contradictory.

But that’s the thing about conspiratorial thinking: It is inherently contradictory. It is not a very good framework from which to come to a consensus, which is what you need to move policy along. So the people exist, but I’m not sure that it is a coherent political group. And even if it were, since the main thing that adheres the group together is thinking that someone is out to get them, then perversely, solving their problem politically just lowers their trust in the political system.

It’s not a very good mechanism for someone who wants to organize people and turn it into political mobilization. The biggest lesson from this, however, is that the problem remains: There are a lot of people for whom the health care system, or healthful choices, or living in a healthy environment, are either inaccessible or unaffordable.

More so than whether or not the Republicans can hold the MAHA coalition together, to me, is the question of who is competing for that voter for whom that matters. Do we have a competing vision on the other side? As of yet, we don’t really have a clear one, and that’s more of a longstanding political problem than whether or not people have faith in R.F.K. Jr. to help them live forever.

Wallace-Wells: Taking this seriously as a social question, I would throw a few other ingredients into the mix with a longer view. One is that it’s really important, when we talk about vaccine hesitancy and the decline of vaccination rates, to think about the fact that we no longer deal with infectious disease. And we haven’t, depending on how long you want to count, for 60, 70 or 80 years.

There are very few people around who have meaningful memories of what it was like to have to deal with those diseases, and who therefore have a real appreciation for the benefits of vaccination. A lot of people talk about: Once the World War II generation died, people stopped worrying enough about World War III, and it may bring us there.

There’s something similar happening with vaccines. The people who grew up in a world with vaccination and much more limited disease spread can take for granted the basic safety of the world around them. They can think to themselves: It’s relatively safe for me not to vaccinate my child because around me, I don’t see any of this disease. Forgetting is a really big part of this story.

It also helps to keep in mind that, while there are partisan valences to this social movement — and over the last few years they’ve been channeled into one particular partisan direction — a lot of these sentiments are pre-political, and exist in populations across the spectrum. It’s kind of a cliché to talk about the left-wing vaccine skeptic, but those people have been there for a long time. In fact, R.F.K. was one of those people not very long ago.

But it’s also the case that even those who are relatively more conservative are not necessarily engaging with this set of questions through their politics directly. When you think about the measles outbreak in Texas last year, or the one in South Carolina this year, both of those outbreaks were in religious communities.

Cottom: I was about to say, religion plays a significant role.

Wallace-Wells: A huge part, yeah. But, of course, even those two communities responded really differently. In Texas, the community as a whole did not decide to get vaccinated en masse in response to the measles outbreak, even though it resulted in a tragic death.

In South Carolina, they did take a turn and did much more to get vaccinated. And that has to do with the very particular backgrounds of those communities — the people who were there and why they were saying no — which is all to say that this is incredibly complex terrain, in which most people probably have felt some affinity for the stated causes of MAHA.

If you say: Do you want our kids to be healthy? Do you want to end chronic illness? Do you want people to eat healthier? — who’s going to say no to all of that? The question is how those sentiments, which are pre-political, get appropriated and channeled into politics.

I don’t think that the last few years are going to be that satisfying to many people, and when they’re tallying up the wins and the defeats a few years from now, they’re not going to feel like their side changed the world.

Sifferlin: Yeah. This raises this question: Has MAHA emerged from a genuine institutional failure, or has it emerged from a perception of........

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