When he was interviewed onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked a question unlikely to be on anyone’s mind in the midst of upheaval in the department he oversees and a conflict in the Middle East: “Who’s stronger—you or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth?”
The exchange was emblematic of the role that Kennedy and other HHS officials played during the four-day conference. As some MAGA attendees grumbled over the war in Iran, they were met with a whole lot of MAHA. Kennedy went after Froot Loops and bemoaned how Americans don’t know how to cook anymore. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services chief, warned about hospice fraud in California. And Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the acting director (of a sort) of the CDC, explained the value of repurposing already-approved drugs for new diseases. “This sounds geeky,” he told the crowd, “but it is really, really important.”
Perhaps the administration thought that leaning into health would distract from what’s going on in Iran—a sore subject for Republicans who want President Trump to focus on domestic issues. Kennedy did say, unprompted, that he believed that his war-averse uncle and his father would have approved of the military action. But he also was the most prominent member of the Trump administration to take the stage at CPAC. Notably absent was anyone named Trump or any official involved in the decision to bomb Iran.
If that was indeed the administration’s strategy, it didn’t seem to work among MAGA world’s staunchest opponents to Trump’s recent military action. Although a poll of this year’s CPAC attendees found that 89 percent approve of the administration’s actions in Iran, others I spoke with worried about the specter of another “forever war” in the Middle East. As Madeline Elizabeth, a Republican strategist who attended CPAC, told me, “I think that the MAHA movement is almost the only thing that’s ‘America First’ about this administration.”
As he has in his other recent public appearances, Kennedy mostly stuck to his talking points. He touted what he considers to be his wins at HHS—notably, the flipping of the food pyramid to emphasize protein consumption—and insisted that the president was “on my side on virtually every issue” when Kennedy decided to endorse Trump in 2024. But Kennedy didn’t mention his remaking of the CDC’s vaccine-advisory committee or the changes to the recommended childhood-immunization schedule, which are easily among the most consequential policies of his first year in office. Perhaps he avoided doing so because, as The Washington Post has reported, the White House has instructed him to stop taking action on vaccines for fear of Republicans losing the midterms. (The HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told me, “We remain focused on the priorities Americans consistently say matter most to them, including tackling chronic disease, improving nutrition and food quality, and lowering the cost of care and prescription drugs.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
The closest Kennedy came to any talk of immunization was when he mentioned that, growing up, he didn’t know any kids who had autism—a seemingly veiled reference to his long-standing belief that vaccines have contributed to the rise in autism since the 1990s. That rise, according to experts, is largely due to better surveillance and broader diagnostic criteria. When Bhattacharya did talk about vaccines—to praise the shingles shot and to tease research on whether it might reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s—the crowd was unmoved. Bhattacharya’s only real applause line came when he said, “It’s no longer Tony Fauci’s NIH.”
[Read: RFK Jr. is losing his grip on the CDC]
Most of the CPAC-goers I spoke with told me they loved Kennedy. Usually in those words: I love him. They weren’t always sure about the specifics of his agenda, but they liked that he was in favor of being healthy. A CPAC attendee named Michael Smith, who was promoting the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools and dressed as Moses—complete with a staff and a stick-on beard—told me that Kennedy was “getting us back to the Garden of Eden diet.” Several people, including a woman who says she lost 50 pounds just eating meat, told me their personal health stories. (Kennedy recently acknowledged that he’s on the carnivore diet.) Everyone, it seemed, had read Kennedy’s best seller, The Real Anthony Fauci, and many volunteered to me that they had not gotten the COVID vaccine.
The Kennedy adoration created an odd sense of tension at the meeting. It’s true that some GOP strategists have argued that the MAHA coalition is the key to Republicans winning the midterms later this year. For the most part, they’re talking about health-conscious voters who might be persuaded to back Republican candidates. Perhaps it should be no surprise that, at CPAC, the fans are MAGA first and MAHA as a kind of bonus.
But at the same time, the MAGA loyalties clearly supersede the MAHA hype. It was striking how no one seemed to be there solely, or even primarily, to support MAHA. At one point during Kennedy’s fireside chat, the interviewer, Mercedes Schlapp, asked attendees whether they were “MAHA moms.” In a crowd of several hundred, maybe a dozen hands shot up. Scanning the crowd, I saw no shortage of Trump-themed apparel, but no one wearing MAHA T-shirts or hats. Talking about MAHA priorities “doesn’t electrify anybody, and quite honestly, it’s not the conversation, like, broadly, that’s being had,” Vish Burra, a Republican strategist and MAGA provocateur, told me. (Last fall, Burra was fired from his job as a producer for One America News Network after he posted an anti-Semitic AI-generated video on his personal X account. He later deleted the post.)
[Read: The meme-washing of RFK Jr.]
Kennedy, who recently underwent surgery for a rotator-cuff injury, ended up telling Schlapp that Hegseth might have the edge in a test of strength: “He’s got a couple of pounds on me.” But even if Hegseth can bench more than the HHS secretary, at the country’s best-known conservative gathering, Kennedy was the one the Trump administration seems to have tasked with lifting up its disappointed fans.
The post MAHA Has Been Given an Impossible Task appeared first on The Atlantic.
