President Trump will meet privately on Thursday with leaders of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, at a time when the president and his party risk losing disenchanted MAHA voters ahead of the midterm elections.
Neither the White House nor Mr. Kennedy’s office would provide details of the meeting. But according to two people familiar with the event who were granted anonymity to discuss a private meeting, the attendees will include activists who have been fighting to rid the food supply of toxins and who are angry about steps Mr. Trump has taken to protect glyphosate, a weedkiller, and its maker, Bayer.
They include Kelly Ryerson, an environmental activist known online as the Glyphosate Girl, who has accused the Trump administration of being “entirely owned by Bayer and the chemical companies.” Mr. Kennedy is also scheduled to attend, as are top White House officials and Dr. Casey Means, whose nomination for surgeon general has stalled on Capitol Hill.
That Mr. Trump is having the meeting at all reflects the fragility of his alliance with the so-called MAHA Moms, many of them former Democrats or independents, who took a leap of faith in supporting Mr. Trump in 2024 after Mr. Kennedy endorsed him.
At the time, Mr. Trump pledged to address Americans’ concerns about “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food.”
But in February, Mr. Trump infuriated movement leaders when he issued an executive order to ramp up production of glyphosate and offer limited liability protections to Bayer, which is facing thousands of lawsuits claiming that the weedkiller, marketed as Roundup, causes cancer.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal of one of those cases later this month; the Trump administration has sided with Bayer. MAHA activists intend to stage a demonstration on the courthouse steps and are set to be joined by progressive Democrats, including Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who wrote an opinion essay with Ms. Ryerson on the issue.
“The MAHA movement and Democrats do not agree on everything,” they wrote. “But what we share is a refusal to let corporate interests write the rules and then hide behind agencies that move too slowly or rely too heavily on industry-submitted data.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a correspondent based in Washington for The New York Times, covering Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump’s health agenda.
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