In private meeting, Trump soothes disenchanted MAHA leaders

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump met privately Thursday with leaders of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement as part of a high-level White House strategy session to keep disenchanted MAHA voters in the fold ahead of the midterm elections.

Neither the White House nor Kennedy’s office would provide details of the meeting. Top White House officials including Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, spent nearly two hours soliciting the activists’ ideas on messaging and other matters during a roundtable discussion in the West Wing, according to two participants. Trump also invited them into the Oval Office.

One attendee, Alex Clark, a health and wellness podcaster for conservative group Turning Point USA, said she and other activists left the meeting feeling “hopeful and grateful for an opportunity to have a face-to-face conversation and be heard by all of President Trump’s top advisers.”

She said Trump spent more than 20 minutes with the group in the Oval Office. When she joked that “these are the ladies who aren’t going to be ‘Team Diet Coke,’ ” the president pressed the red “Diet Coke” button he had installed on the Resolute Desk, and a server appeared with a glass bottle.

A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, said Trump “stopped by a roundtable hosted by Secretary Kennedy and senior White House officials with MAHA activists,” adding that the administration “regularly meets with the MAHA community to hear their concerns and advice.”

The attendees also included Trump’s pick for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, whose nomination has stalled on Capitol Hill. Clark said she told officials that Means is “trustworthy to the MAHA base” and that one way for the administration to get its message out would be to ensure that she is confirmed.

That Trump had 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 Trump in 2024 after Kennedy endorsed him.

At the time, Trump pledged to address Americans’ concerns about “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food.”

But in February, 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.

Thursday’s roundtable discussion seemed focused on healing those wounds; the attendees also included 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.”

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal of one of the Bayer 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 Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, who wrote an opinion essay with 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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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