President-elect Donald Trump is basking in the afterglow of a triumphant November. It is a time of big feelings and even bigger promises, the most surprising beneficiary of which may be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump told a preelection rally at Madison Square Garden, shortly before he placed the government’s medical-research apparatus under the influence of a vaccine skeptic who believes milk should be unpasteurized. Thus, MAGA has been fused with MAHA, or “Make America Healthy Again,” RFK Jr.’s plan to remake the chemical composition of Americans’ bodies by going to war on food additives and sedentary lifestyles.
Trump’s endorsement of MAHA is surprising, not least because of his own ruinous personal eating habits. During his first term, he sabotaged the previous federal push to encourage Americans to eat healthier, an initiative led by former First Lady Michelle Obama called “Let’s Move!,” which became a target of Trump’s vendetta against her husband. With little deliberation, Trump allowed then–Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to roll back Obama-era restrictions on the nutritional content of school-provided lunches. The episode not only demonstrates Trump’s hypocrisy and capriciousness but also casts serious doubt on RFK Jr.’s prospects as a disruptor of the health status quo.
“Let’s Move!” had grand ambitions when it launched in 2010: ending childhood obesity within a generation through a mix of public-awareness campaigns and food policy. On the latter front were new guidelines, championed by the Task Force on Childhood Obesity, designed to limit the calorie, sugar, and sodium content in the food children were being fed at school. But as with nearly everything Barack and Michelle Obama did, this proposal sent conservatives into hysterics. “Get your damn hands off my fries, lady,” quipped Glenn Beck, while Rush Limbaugh ridiculed Michelle Obama’s waistline and mocked her for eating ribs. Cries of “food police!” became the norm. Brian Kilmeade warned that salt was going to be confiscated. Sean Hannity asked, “Does every American family need a dietician appointed by the government to tell them that this food is going to make you fat?”
This media outrage machine was joined by Republican obstructionism in Congress. Representative Michele Bachmann accused the president of trying to implement a “nanny state.” When Barack Obama balked at the backlash ahead of the 2012 election, his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, joked that the president “was going to dig up the First Lady’s organic garden to put in a Bob’s Big Boy.” By 2015, anti-Obama sentiment had produced a Republican bill in the Senate to revert to the old USDA nutrition regulations, and when Trump was sworn into office, rolling back “Let’s Move!” was one of his first acts as president.
That Trump would, years later, green-light a similar initiative led by one of his cronies can perhaps be chalked up to pure spite. But it is also a testament to how hatred of the Obamas is no longer the driving force in Republican politics that it once was and how some of their ideas, such as being more conscientious about what children eat, may have bipartisan appeal. With the rise of tradwives and jacked bro podcasters, the old conservative consensus that eating junk food signals red-blooded Americanness is fading, while encouraging diets lower in salt, sugar, and additives is no longer Big Brother incarnate. Still, while the Obamas had laudable goals, they were ultimately waylaid by the same forces that make it hard to believe RFK Jr.’s stated agenda will amount to much and that once led congressional Republicans to recategorize tomato sauce as a vegetable in order to keep pizza on school lunch menus.
The largest impediment to RFK Jr. doing anything substantial to mitigate the public-health threats posed by big agriculture is that it would disrupt the cash flow of companies that profit from keeping Americans unhealthy and whose interests are more germane to the Republican Party than anything RFK Jr. might offer. The regulations Trump rolled back with Perdue in 2017 can also be understood as a deregulatory move designed to benefit large food companies. Trump’s actual sympathies can most accurately be gleaned from how he tried to install the CEO of Carl’s Jr. in his previous Cabinet and how he has never shown interest in expanding health-care access. It seems unlikely that he would nominate a Cabinet member who is as dangerous to that overarching pro-business agenda as RFK Jr. believes himself to be.
