Make Roundup Great Again

The MAHA Moms have turned on President Trump.

President Trump’s executive order aimed at spurring production of a pesticide has infuriated leaders of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement

When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw his support behind Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign for the White House, his corps of health conscious, mostly female, followers embraced the president, who pledged to address Americans’ concerns about “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food.”

Some of the women, who call themselves the MAHA 

Moms after Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, abandoned the Democratic Party to vote for Mr. Trump.

But the executive order Mr. Trump issued Wednesday to increase domestic production of glyphosate — a widely used weedkiller and possible carcinogen that has been the target of thousands of lawsuits, including one brought by Mr. Kennedy — stunned and infuriated the activists.
It now threatens to turn the brief MAHA-Trump marriage into a divorce.

“Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” said Alex Clark, a health and wellness podcaster for the conservative group Turning Point U.S.A., which is closely allied with the president. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

In issuing his order, Mr. Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, a Korean-war era law that allows the government to compel the manufacture of supplies that are critical for national defense.

The order is aimed at boosting domestic supplies of phosphorous, which is necessary for the manufacture of certain munitions, as well as for glyphosate, which has been deemed “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Glyphosate is marketed as the weedkiller Roundup. In 2018, Mr. Kennedy helped win a $289 million jury award against Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, now owned by Bayer….

The campaign against glyphosate has been central to the MAHA movement. Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the advocacy group Moms Across America, has been a leader in that campaign, commissioning private laboratory testing for pesticide residue and petitioning retailers to remove the chemicals from their shelves by framing it as a risk to children.

In an interview, Ms. Honeycutt called Mr. Trump’s order “an egregious offense to what he promised” and “a betrayal.” As for Mr. Kennedy, she said his hands are tied: “Bobby is not in charge of Trump.”