Has Trump Created a Monster?

From Politico comes a story about one of the kook factions that Trump successfully pandered to to win the Presidency a second time.

The so-called Make America Healthy Again "movement" (MAHA) -- a collection of environmentalist-adjacent Luddites who oppose such boons to human flourishing as vaccination, modern fertilizers, and pesticides -- has become impatient because they feel Trump hasn't handed them enough favors. Some of them are now threatening to withdraw their support for him in the mid-terms.

This comes, predictably, with Republican officials protesting that they've done more for MAHA than the Democrats ever did:

"We thought we were getting a different administration that wanted to stand up to special interests, stand up to the pharmaceutical industry, stand up to the food companies, stand up to Big Ag, Big Chem. And that is not what we got. What we have right now is business as usual," said Vani Hari, a leader in the MAHA movement known as Food Babe who rose to prominence through her fight against chemicals in food.

"We're going to vote for whatever candidate puts the health of our children first," Hari said. "I don't have loyalty to anybody. And a lot of people feel that way within the MAHA movement."

This reminds me of a couple of things, the first being how conservatives -- seemingly until yesterday -- once correctly ridiculed such people as the lunatics they are.

Second, it reminds me of how effective voter blocs work in a two-party system: By being up for grabs, thereby making both parties responsive to their agenda.

Whether accurate or not, the perception that Trump needed MAHA to win in 2024, which he reinforced by handing Bobby Kennedy a cabinet post, is now part of the conventional wisdom. Based on the Republicans' past, sorry history of appeasing the Democrats on everything else, it's a safe bet that this will continue indefinitely along this new frontier. And the taste of political power Trump handed MAHA will have emboldened them and made them not content with being taken for granted by either party.

In an age where neither party qualifies as a champion of science -- with Democrat misuse of science to pretend their political aims are legitimate making Republican rejection of science seem less bad than it is -- Trump may well have made this army of crackpots into a political force that can press for horrible government science policy for decades to come.

-- CAV