Trump angering MAHA with glyphosate order gives Democrats an opening

President Donald Trump is careening toward the Make America Healthy Again iceberg after issuing an executive order to boost the domestic production of a key herbicide called glyphosate. Democrats see an opportunity to steer the health-conscious movement back to their side. 

Trump strode into a second term in the White House after former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped his independent bid for president and endorsed him. Kennedy’s MAHA movement, which disavows chemicals in food and pushes natural alternatives, played a key part in Trump’s victory — and Trump rewarded Kennedy by making him Health and Human Services secretary.

But Trump’s recent moves that benefit the very chemicals MAHA hates are creating fissures in the base that helped deliver him to the White House, with less than nine months to go until the pivotal midterm elections and primary elections starting next week. Democrats who hope to strip Trump’s near-total control of Washington now see an opportunity to claw MAHA back into their fold. 

“What the President did in the EO, and sort of saying, you know, ‘trust me on this one, we’ll get to it later,’ has really angered a lot of people,” Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, the top appropriator on the panel with oversight over the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview with CNBC. “It does create some huge opportunities for candidates who are willing to talk about the health of our diet, ‘food is medicine’ [and] toxic chemicals in our environment.”

Pingree is pushing a bill to revoke the executive order on glyphosate with Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and has long advocated against chemicals in food. 

At issue for MAHA is not only last week’s executive order to spur glyphosate — the main chemical in Bayer-Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, which has been linked in the past to cancer — but is still deemed safe by the EPA. MAHA advocates say the White House and Republicans have spurned them at multiple turns.

The administration has also sided with Bayer-Monsanto in a Supreme Court case that would weaken petitioners’ ability to sue if they believe they got cancer from a pesticide or herbicide. And congressional Republicans are pushing a new farm bill with what MAHA advocates argue is a “liability shield” for chemical manufacturers. 

“This EO is feeling very, very much like the breaking point,” said Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA advocate who is known by the moniker “Glyphosate Girl.” “People can’t continue to make excuses for the administration and saying, ‘well, you know, they’ll get to it or whatever it is,’ because it’s just not happening.”