Double-Barrel Outrage Watch: The Dismantlements of MAGA and MAHA

What Donald Trump and MAGA are doing to America is matched by what he and Robert Kennedy Jr. are doing with MAHA. Both are disasters for the country.

Trump is warping American democracy, constitutional governance and international preeminence—into ugly authoritarianism at home and weakness abroad. He and Kennedy, instead of Making America Healthy Again, are killing America’s public health system and endangering millions of lives.

An Authoritarian Crisis

Trump is trying to convert the Executive Branch, constitutionally meant to be one co-equal branch of government (in fact, inferior to Congress, which is Article 1 while the Executive is Article 2) into a colossus in command of everything, with him as its all-but-royal ruler. His attitude, expressed most recently last month, is “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President of the United States.”

• He’s exercised dominion over agencies set up by Congress to be independent—and is now trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve, which could undermine the value of the dollar, the world’s reserve currency. He fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her of rigging job numbers—then installed a replacement who is expected to rig numbers in his favor, undermining the trust that businesses, economists, other federal agencies and state and local governments rely on, along with foreign leaders.
• He’s usurped the powers of Congress, ignoring its decisions on budgets and appropriations. He’s also defied court rulings and is attempting to take over the states’ Constitutional power over elections by ordering a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants and banning mail-in voting and voting machines.
• He’s politicized the formerly independent Justice Department so that it will “go after” his adversaries. And he’s used his pardon power to free hundreds of supporters who invaded the US Capitol to assist him in overturning the free and fair 2020 election.
• He’s declared more national emergencies than any modern president, enabling him to avoid Congressional intervention as he imposes his will on the economy with tariffs and subsidies that reward favored nations and industries and punish disfavored ones. Example of the first: fossil fuel industries. Example of the latter: wind and solar energy companies.
• He’s a major cheerleader for and investor in the crypto currency industry, making almost $6 billion for himself and his family. Buyers of his crypto do so in secret, offering foreign and domestic influence-seekers a way to bribe him. Democrats accuse him of corruption, but no one is stopping him because he’s ordered agencies that might, like the SEC, not to regulate the industry.
• He’s trying unilaterally to change American culture by pressuring universities, law firms, government agencies and corporations to abandon diversity programs and toe his line on their operations, clients and business practices. He’s ordered the Smithsonian Institution to abandon its traditionally straight-forward representation of American history in favor of a rose-colored version.
• He’s invoking a border emergency to arrest and deport a million undocumented immigrants a year, only a small percentage of whom have ever been convicted of a crime. He’s converted the roughhouse Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency into his personal paramilitary force and is taking over policing of Democrat-governed cities. He’s also threatening to use military force, without Congressional authorization, against foreign drug cartels.
• He wants to rename the Defense Department into the War Department, its pre-Cold War name, as though that will scare away adversaries. However, Russia treats him with contempt as it steps up bombing Ukraine.  Trump should be giving Ukraine all the weapons it asks for, but Trump seems not to want Ukraine to actually defeat Russia. In response to Moscow’s intransigence, he said “maybe they have to fight a little longer” as though both parties are equally culpable.
• India used to be a US ally against China. Because of Trump’s tariffs, it’s now an ally of China and Russia. Most European nations are still allies against Russia, but they do not trust that Trump will adhere to the NATO Charter and come to their aid if Russia attacks one of them.
• His Cabinet officers fawn over him like a dictator and Republicans in Congress dare not resist him. Lower courts try to restrain him, but his Supreme Court majority so far has blessed his actions close to 90 percent of the time.

So that’s MAGA—just a part of it. Kennedy, author of MAHA (and a longstanding critic of vaccinations) has encountered more resistance than Trump—from Democrats and a few Republicans in Congress who did battle with him in a raucous Senate Finance Committee hearing last week. Also 6,000 current and former employees of the Department of Health and Human Services and 21 medical and disease groups which issued a joint statement calling on him to resign. The American Medical Assn, American Public Health Assn and the American Academy of Pediatrics also have decried his policies.

A Health Crisis

Kennedy has a (so far) a staunch defender in Trump. In 2024 Trump said “I’m going to let him (Kennedy) go wild on health…on the food…on the medicines.” The White House blessed his firing CDC director Susan Monarez just one month after her confirmation and her replacement by a biotech investor with no public health experience.

• He dissolved the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and installed allies who question the safety and necessity of long-standing immunization protocols. Monarez said she was fired after refusing to accept the panel’s recommendations without rigorous studies.
• MAHA is a sweeping agenda that claims to target the root causes of chronic disease. It includes bans on some food dyes, restrictions on Supplemental Nutrition purchases by the poor, and vaccine “transparency” reforms. But health experts warn that MAHA is less a public health strategy and more a political manifesto. The American Academy of Pediatrics condemned the SNAP restrictions as “punitive and unsupported by nutritional science,” while multiple CDC directors called Kennedy’s vaccine policies “dangerous and destabilizing.”
• The Trump administration proposed a 26% cut to HHS, including a staggering $18 billion reduction for the National Institutes of Health and $3.6 billion from the CDC. But the most stunning example of the human cost came last month when the National Cancer Institute announced it would pull out of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium—a network of 16 academic centers conducting early-phase trials for high-risk childhood brain cancers. Sen. John Ossoff called the cancellation “a decision that will cost children’s’ lives.”
• In one of the first instances of Congressional Republicans’ pushing back against the Trump administration, both the House and Senate are moving to cancel cuts to the NIH. The House Appropriations Committee, with leadership support, voted to keep NIH funding at its current level ($48 billion) and the Senate committee approved a $400 million increase for NIH. However, cuts at other health agencies and university research grants remain up in the air, pending the outcome of negotiations and Trump appeals from district court decisions.
• Now the Trump-Kennedy agenda is inspiring copycat policies at the state level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced plans to eliminate all vaccine mandates—including those for schoolchildren. Ladapo called mandates “immoral” and compared them to “slavery.” A Florida law currently requires immunizations for polio, measles, mumps, tetanus and other communicable diseases. Removing these protections would make Florida the nation’s first state (but probably not the last) to abolish school-entry vaccine requirements.
• The backlash was immediate. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned that the move “will put children at higher risk for getting sick, and have ripple effects across their communities.” Unvaccinated children could spread their diseases to others, including unwary adults, creating chaos. Florida academics issued statements affirming that vaccines are “safe, effective and essential.”
• Kennedy and Trump’s cuts to NIH and academic medical research have produced a brain drain, with young investigators fleeing to Europe, Canada and Asia. A survey sponsored by the journal Nature found that 80% of post-doctoral researchers are considering leaving the country.

Other Kennedy outrages:

• When measles cases were surging in Texas, Kennedy recommended cod liver oil and Vitamin A as better alternative treatments to vaccination. Last month, he cancelled $500 million in funding for mRNA research to develop medicines to combat future pandemics as it did for COVID. He has claimed, without evidence, that mRNA vaccines cause “widespread and  serious harm, even death” and that his preferred alternative is the centuries-old use of weakened viruses though scientists assert that mRNA vaccines are faster to develop, easier to update and have shown strong safety and efficacy results.
• Kennedy’s Food and Drug Administration now limits access to COVID booster shots to persons over 65 and those with serious medical conditions. Kennedy claims he is not “taking vaccines away,” but that’s disputed by Senators of both parties. And public health experts warn that Kennedy’s policies could stop decades of vaccine progress, especially if mRNA platforms are sidelined for future pandemics.

The Trump-Kennedy-DeSantis axis is not just reshaping public health policy—it is redefining what constitutes truth in medicine, much as Trump has confused Americans about what the truth is in dozens of other spheres. If Democrats can’t win control of at least one chamber of Congress next year and there is no check on Trump and his administration, one can only tremble at the damage he can do in the remaining years of his second term. And if Kennedy is not brought to heel, the consequences will be measured in outbreaks, untreated illnesses and lives lost to preventable disease.