Make America Sick Again: MAHA and its Cruel Misdirection

Artwork by Rachel Genito

Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, is a Trumpian health initiative, spearheaded by RFK Jr.—a staunch anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist. MAHA began in the summer of 2024, before Trump was elected, when siblings Casey and Calley Means appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show to discuss privatized health and America’s health crisis. Their points were relatively sound—they claimed that the system is rigged against the patient, and that modern medicine is manufacturing new diseases to milk the money out of the general population. We can all agree on that. The siblings, like most of us, are frustrated with the medical and health industry, and strive to advocate for ways of rethinking healthcare. 

You might say: that sounds pretty great… It is true that the Means siblings come extremely close to a leftist understanding of healthcare, naming Big Pharma and pundits such as United Healthcare and CVS as money-hungry, amoral institutions. Yet, here’s where they go wrong: most people would agree that Americans are vastly unhealthy, sick, and dying because healthcare and fresh produce are gatekept behind a paywall, and even when the paywall is breached, the quality of healthcare and produce is severely subpar. The Means siblings, along with RFK Jr. and the rest of the MAHA initiative, argue that we should not sell a broken product to the people, and instead focus on the individual’s responsibility to maintain their health.

Of course we should not sell a broken system to Americans. This system shouldn’t be sold at all. But most would argue that universal healthcare is better than no healthcare at all. MAHA departs from leftist thought by drawing criticism away from the institutionalized, inherently broken system of healthcare, and directs it towards the day-to-day choices of everyday Americans, such as diet, sun exposure, and proximity to raw milk. They claim that your health is your problem, and just because the health industry is corrupt doesn’t mean you have an excuse to be sick, unhealthy, or dead. 

This is the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” kind of capitalist rhetoric that gets us virtually nowhere. MAHA thinks Americans aren’t eating healthy because they don’t know they’re supposed to, not because their benevolent leader, Trump, cancelled 94 million pounds of food aid; contributed to a government shutdown that delayed and demolished EBT for November; or slashed food stamp funding so harshly that 2.4 million Americans are expected to lose access to food aid. Or because of manufactured food deserts that oversupply a geographical area with cheap, fast, and unhealthy fast food instead of markets where fresh produce is readily available and affordable.

MAHA uses the critique of corrupt healthcare pundits to create a Trojan Horse of an argument—what lies beneath is a classist, racist, and overly-individual rhetoric that ignores institutional corruption and places the blame and responsibility on the subjugated, rather than the corporations that have manufactured a monopoly on sickness and dying. We should know by now that any iteration of “Make America… Again” is shorthand for employing facism and state-sanctioned violence in the most cruel way. You shouldn’t trust the administration that is cutting food stamps, EBT, Medicaid, and Medicare to tell you why Americans are unhealthy, sick, and dying at disproportionate rates

Ella Ferrero

Rachel Genito @lavender_hag