When the Snake Oil Runs Out (or Causes Explosive Diarrhea)

The MAHA movement is splintering as even true believers sour on RFK Jr.

Complex systems have certain things in common, when they’re stable-ish. The human body, the economy, and the global climate each produce “emergent effects”—the more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts phenomena (consciousness, weather, culture) that make the universe feel like something beyond a giant bag of atoms. Because they happen out of the alchemy of many moving parts, it’s easy to take these effects for granted (how could anything we do affect the weather? Isn’t it great that an invisible hand runs the economy?), and hard to predict what changes to the system will genuinely endanger them.

Until we find out.

Stick a boat in the Gulf of Aden and suddenly people are googling “global supply chain.” Let one too many people realize there might be an issue with subprime mortgages and find out what it means to be “too big to fail.” Delay $10 million in National Forest Service grants and watch Minnesota burn. The consequences of stress-testing complexity become suddenly obvious and risk rapid escalation.

U.S. public health is a complex system. Its engineers and regulators, many of them the scientists and career civil servants Trump and his Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., hate so much, are responsible for caretaking hard-won emergent effects we rely on daily —e.g., herd immunity to once-fatal diseases, or the perception that the fruit and vegetables on our shelves are safe to eat, or public faith in expertise and democracy itself.

In this light, arguably the most toxic substance RFK Jr. has been selling since his appointment last year to HHS Secretary is the lie of simplicity. His Trump-approved plan to Make America Healthy Again is a vision of health, government, and reality that trades interdependence for a fantasy of personal control and optimization. It is a national and international scientific research apparatus for “do your own research”; a complex network of constituencies and departments for a handful of pet issues; “evidence-based” health and nutrition recommendations for a wild west of biohacking and red meat gender panic.

The rest of the Trump administration has gone a long way selling the idea that the American project can and should be simple — we just have to drain the swamp, build a wall, let the king executive decide everything, DOGE the bureaucracy to death, and get foreigners out so it’s only hard-working (white) Americans left. Much has been written about how ingrained conspiracy thinking is in the MAGA worldview, which in itself is always a rejection of true complexity in favor of neat, closed loops of cause-and-effect.

But MAHA was always a little different than MAGA Classic™ — or at least branded itself that way. RFK rode his horse into town on the drafts of Covid backlash and the libertarian fringes of wellness culture. MAHA’s unlikely coalition of trad wives and paleo bros, Big Pharma protesters and forever chemical alarm-sounders, vaccine skeptics and chronic disease advocates, intersected with Kennedy’s long-standing preoccupations and seemed to many on the right a surprising but welcome addition to the MAGA tent in 2024. To some on the left, it was an opportunity to experience the unprecedented feeling, vis-à-vis Trump appointees, of “he’s terrible, but I guess I don’t disagree with him about everything…”

So what did RFK do with the combined support of Trump and a seemingly real voting coalition? He fired a whole lot of experts, ended the War on Protein with a Dorito body-shaped food pyramid, and worked out in jeans with Kid Rock. He told the former CDC director to “only work with the political appointees that he had put in place at CDC, and not to speak or work with the career scientists.” He coasted on the emergent effects of a complex system he has no interest in running in its totality — while actively decimating what makes it function. It’s all well and good to be a vaccine skeptic when measles is a thing of the past. It’s fine to defund the CDC and support withdrawal from the WHO when Ebola and hantavirus haven’t come knocking. And it’s much easier to promote eating whole foods when the FDA has done the job of screening them for pathogens to a level the average American trusts.

Now, with events like the recent Cyclospora outbreak (and screwworm, raw milk contamination, and the rest of the above), the honeymoon is over, even for many MAHA faithful members. It’s impossible to calculate exactly how much RFK’s mishandling of HHS is to blame for the contaminated lettuce disaster of which you’ve probably heard the symptoms described in all too great detail, but there are plenty of signs. Some former allies are disillusioned by his support of Trump’s EO to increase production of the carcinogen-laden pesticide glyphosate, and a perception that he’s failed in his pledge to keep big business out of healthcare and environmental decision-making. (He has.)

Vaccine policy has been arguably his most visible failing, from literally any vantage point. The vast majority of Americans still support vaccines, including 86 percent of MAHA parents who say that childhood vaccinations are important — to the extent that Trump pollster Whit Ayres has called promoting the views of America’s most visible skeptic “political poison” for the midterms. Meanwhile, Kennedy fired the entire CDC vaccine board, pulled $500 million in mRNA vaccine funding, and tried to scale back childhood vaccine recommendations…hey, what’s a little poison in the face of a righteous crusade?

Otherwise, the Secretary has reportedly been busy greeting these new political winds by coming to work once a month while key positions remain vacant across HHS. He’s been creating brand new opportunities for big business in the unregulated supplements market — thank goodness Joe Rogan will be able to get his “Wolverine Stack” of peptides. He’s started a podcast and, now, a TV show. Drunk on his own snake oil cocktail, he’s telling us to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for ourselves, while his abdication of leadership makes us structurally unhealthier.

For all MAHA’s false paths, there’s something hopeful about it as a coalition, especially in light of its current implosion—an across-the-aisle recognition of certain shortcomings to our approach to public health, and a growing recognition of what’s *not* the solution (RFK). There has to be a way to eke some fruit from that common ground; maybe the Democrats can win some disaffected MAHAs over in the midterms. The anti-corporate, pro-environmental regulation water is fine over here.

RFK Jr., meanwhile, will continue to dwindle in a prison of his own making as a MAGA-world celebrity influencer. It’s the paradox of Trump appointees: for all their boundless appetites for power and destruction, they have terminally limited vision of what to build, much less how to govern. Influencing is not how you tend to a complex system. A TV show is not how you keep 350 million people from the threat of explosive diarrhea and worse. For that, you need a government with an interest in its own complex, essential job.