Trump Expands the Pesticide RFK Jr. Called a Carcinogen, and Now the MAHA Moms Who Elected Him Are Done

The women who helped carry Donald Trump to victory in 2024 on the promise of a healthier America are now openly threatening to sit out the midterms. This follows the president signing an executive order expanding production of a weedkiller that his own health secretary spent years suing in court.

In February 2026, Trump invoked the Defence Production Act to guarantee the domestic supply of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the world's most widely used herbicide, declaring it 'central to American economic and national security.' The White House fact sheet framed the order as a cornerstone of agricultural productivity and a bulwark against foreign supply-chain dependence.

For the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, a coalition of mothers, wellness advocates and vaccine sceptics who crossed into the MAGA fold alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it felt like a direct hit on everything they were told they had won.

The Executive Order That Fractured a Coalition

Trump signed the glyphosate executive order on 18 February 2026, and the backlash from within his own coalition was immediate. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit that tracks pesticide exposure, published a statement the same day calling it 'a big middle finger to every MAHA mom.' EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook said, 'By granting immunity to the makers of the nation's most widely used pesticide, President Trump just gave Bayer a license to poison people. Full stop.'

The immunity element stings most. The executive order effectively shields glyphosate manufacturers from state-level tort liability, the same legal avenue through which Kennedy, as an attorney in 2018, helped a school groundskeeper with cancer win a landmark case against Monsanto.

Cook said the sequence was impossible to ignore. 'First President Trump sided with Bayer-Monsanto on glyphosate at the Supreme Court, and now he's elevating it through the Defence Department,' he said. He added that MAHA supporters had been 'treated by MAGA like a convenient group of useful idiots ever since Kennedy joined Trump on the campaign trail.'

Vani Hari, the food and wellness influencer known as the 'Food Babe' and a prominent MAHA figure, called the order 'a direct assault on MAHA' and 'a gift to pesticide and chemical industry lobbies at the expense of human health.' Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA activist known online as 'The Glyphosate Girl,' said the move 'stands in direct opposition to the President's original promise to address the contribution of pesticides to chronic disease,' according to The Hill. Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, launched a petition urging Trump to rescind the order entirely.

RFK Jr.'s Reversal and the Campaign Trail Promise

Kennedy's position on glyphosate before he joined Trump's cabinet was unambiguous. In June 2024, while still running for president, he posted on X that 'glyphosate is one of the likely culprits in America's chronic disease epidemic' and pledged his USDA would ban its use as a desiccant on wheat crops. He reiterated in early 2026 that 'I believe glyphosate causes cancer.' That quote came from a podcast appearance, the same month Trump signed the order doing the opposite.

Kennedy's official response, issued through HHS, reversed course. 'Donald Trump's executive order puts America first where it matters most, our defence readiness and our food supply,' he said in a statement. 'Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on pesticides and herbicides... If these inputs disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms.'

He added that he supported the order to bring agricultural chemical production back to the US. The MAHA community's reaction to that statement, posted as replies to Kennedy's X announcement, was furious.

The administration's own MAHA Commission report, released in May 2025, had itself flagged concerns about glyphosate, noting that 'a selection of research studies... have noted a range of possible health effects, ranging from reproductive and developmental disorders as well as cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances.'

A 2022 Centres for Disease Control and Prevention study found glyphosate in the urine of 87% of 650 children tested. The World Health Organisation classified the herbicide as 'probably carcinogenic' in 2015, though the Environmental Protection Agency has reached no such conclusion and has not moved to restrict it.

The Midterm Warning and White House Response

The political consequences have been spelled out directly. A group of 241 MAHA activists wrote to Trump warning that the GOP 'risk[s] losing both moral ground and political support,' and that 'creating broad liability protections for pesticides is a losing issue for your party and your coalition, and may well cost you the House majority in the midterms,' according to Axios. MAHA podcast host Alex Clark reported receiving a wave of messages from women leaving the Republican Party after the glyphosate order.

Kelly Ryerson, who met with senior White House officials on pesticide policy, told Politico that the administration appears to have made a 'calculation' to move on from MAHA. 'The swing Kennedy people aren't going to show up at this point,' she said of the midterms. 'I'm just incredibly frustrated that I don't think that this movement belongs under this administration. They're not going to bat for the voters that put them in office,' she told Al Jazeera.

White House spokesman Kush Desai pushed back in a statement, saying 'Delivering on the MAHA agenda has been a presidential priority since Day One, and no administration has done more to address America's multi-faceted chronic disease epidemic than the Trump Administration.' He also criticised Democrats over pandemic-era school closures and mandates. The statement did not address the glyphosate order or the liability shields.