Trump is ready to ditch voters who are no longer 'useful'

President Donald Trump is ready to ditch a voting coalition that was credited with bringing him back to the White House in 2024, and according to a new piece from the New York Times, it is because they are no longer "useful" to him.

On Thursday, the Times published the transcript of a live event conversation about the "waning" influence of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. MAHA is the informal title applied to the controversial public health agenda espoused by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers.

This cohort of voters was credited with shifting the 2024 election after Kennedy dropped his independent campaign and endorsed Trump. Since then, however, these voters have expressed deep disappointment with Trump's health agenda, particularly his lack of progress on anti-vaccine measures and his push for the production of certain pesticide chemicals. According to reports, figures within the administration are unbothered about the flagging support from MAHA, deeming them to be inconsequential.

Science writer David Wallace-Wells spoke at the event and suggested that Trump's MAHA alliance is declining because it was never "a natural or workable political alignment" to begin with.

"If you look around today in 2026, you see how much it really has been revealed to be a fiction," he explained. "Or, at least, a coalition of convenience full of contradictions, which could not be sustained over the long haul."

Wallace-Wells added that the MAHA movement boiled down to, essentially, an anti-vaccine movement, and it is breaking down now because the general public, overall, does not accept its ideas.

"I’m left thinking: We passed through this fever dream," he added. "We thought that the country had turned against science and public health and vaccines in the aftermath of the pandemic. For some people, that was true. But to the extent that we believe that it was this mass movement that was laying a claim on the American political future, it doesn’t seem to be bearing out."

Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom added later that Trump's conception of politics is intensely transactional, and cannot comfortably mix with MAHA adherents, who have sincere convictions about certain ideas, even if they run counter to profit motives.

"One of the problems that R.F.K. has is the same problem that Donald Trump has, and Trumpism writ large: It’s pretty effective at mobilizing people whose beliefs are transactional, but it really struggles with people who truly believe," Cottom explained. "And so some of what you see — for example, moms across America who had really led this fight against Roundup weed killer, and feeling deeply betrayed by this administration’s supposed interest in health when Trump signed the executive order defending the corporate interests against many in his base, who are actively saying: He has lost my support because of this."

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