President Donald Trump proclaimed victory in 2024 thanks in part due to his success at forging a broad coalition across both the country and political spectrum. Trump’s traditional MAGA base was joined by economic moderates, business opportunists, foreign favor-seekers, and anti-interventionists. Perhaps most notably, the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement rallied around Trump to help push him over the victory line against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Health-conscious and “expert”-skeptical, the Make America Healthy Again movement, or MAHA for short, was the result of an ideological split in the left-wing, environmentalist green movement.
Once upon a time, activists of the tree-hugging, organic food–purchasing, anti-establishment, hippie variety who had nothing but distrust for Big Pharma and the institutional status quo were widely considered to be as far from the Republican Party as humanly possible.
But in the early 2000s, activists in the green and alternative movement found themselves joined—and soon essentially replaced—by a new breed of suit-and-tie, Trust the Science environmentalist. Epitomized by Al Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, these new activists were men and women of white coats, bar charts, and peer-reviewed studies with an almost religious devotion to “Science,” “Institutions,” and “The Data.”
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, their mantra “trust the science” quickly morphed into “trust Big Pharma” and “do as you’re told,” and it became apparent that a split with the anti-authoritarian, pharma-skeptics who built the movement was inevitable.
This group (for the most part) rallied around Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, and many of them stood by his side when, in August, Kennedy dropped out of the race to endorse Trump, attaching MAHA to the Republican MAGA coalition. With Trump’s electoral victory, and Kennedy’s elevation to the position of secretary of health, it is clear who won the battle in the end—the Trust the Science faction having been effectively decimated in the backlash which took place against the illogical authoritarianism of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless, as old opponents lick their wounds, a new one looms on the horizon—an faction that has wormed its way, and continues to worm its way, into the Trump administration at an alarming rate: the ever-opportunistic tech-right.
Fresh off Trump’s 2024 election victory (which was in part made possible thanks to donations from Silicon Valley allies, including Elon Musk), former adversaries of the America First movement were given passage into the new administration. Musk was appointed head of DOGE, giving him considerable power in government despite the fact this his “department” was officially nothing more than an advisory committee; senior executives from Facebook parent company Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir were appointed lieutenant colonels in the U.S. Army as part of a new detachment specifically formed for Big Tech; and Silicon Valley–backed health startups were also able to take advantage of the new political environment.
Hellbound and Down 