The fans and followers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now learning what others have known for decades: You can rely on him to lie whenever it is expedient and profitable, and you can’t rely on him to uphold any principle except his own advancement.

That unpleasant jolt of awareness struck the devoted legions of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement when he dropped their priorities in obedience to the corrupt Trump White House. Across the country, stunned “MAHA Moms” and influencers watched their idol Bobby meekly endorse the president’s decision to rapidly increase production of glyphosate – a ubiquitous pesticide they consider deadly.

Back during the 2024 campaign, Trump promised he would empower Kennedy to “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides,” a category that clearly included glyphosate, known commercially as Roundup. In a June 2024 social media post, Kennedy wrote that glyphosate is “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic…Shockingly, much of our exposure comes from its use as a dessicant [drying agent] on wheat, not as an herbicide…My USDA will ban that practice.” He noted that across Europe, the use of glyphosate is sharply restricted or even banned.

Flash forward to February 18, 2026, when the president issued a directive that not only failed to reduce the use of glyphosate but will rapidly increase its production. Kennedy responded with a wag of his tail and a press release that echoed the usual Trumpian tropes about “America first” (and downplayed any specific mention of the pesticide’s name). Expanding the availability of the substance he had many times denounced as “poison,” he declared, would “protect American families.”

The reaction of Kennedy’s civilian cadre was swift and horrified. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America, a grassroots MAHA organization, accused Trump of placing “toxic farming and businesses” ahead of children’s health – and said he had betrayed “every voter who voted for him to [Make America Healty Again].” Kelly Ryerson, an influencer who goes by “Glyphosate Girl” on X, warned that she was seeing “the bottom drop out of MAHA,” a dire warning for Republicans already pessimistic about their midterm prospects.

Perhaps the MAHA masses shouldn’t have been quite so surprised that Bobby sold them out, since this betrayal has been in the wind for months. When the Trump White House released its much-publicized interagency “MAHA report” last year, its hundreds of pages barely mentioned pesticides or toxic chemicals and equivocated on glyphosate, noting that human studies of its carcinogenic effects are “limited.”

Evidently the outraged MAHA moms weren’t listening to Bobby last year when he told a Senate committee that “we [the Trump administration] cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business…One hundred percent of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” (Farmers driven bankrupt by Trump’s tariffs may be excused for being skeptical.)

That is a complete reversal of Kennedy’s stance from the years when he was suing the makers and distributors of glyphosate on behalf of cancer victims and earning millions of dollars for himself from those successful lawsuits. He’s still collecting those fees, according to his most recent financial disclsoures, which show about $2.4 million in referral fees from a law firm handling lawsuits on behalf of individuals who got sick after glyphosate exposure.

The harsh truth behind his first year as health secretary is that Bobby has succeeded most with the least popular aspect of his agenda, the longstanding campaign against vaccines that first marked his turn toward the far right. Abusing his control of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, he has inflicted grave damage on public health and vaccine research.

Kennedy has far less authority over environmental policy, including the use of toxic chemicals and pollutants such as mercury. Indeed, he has dishonorably silent while Lee Zeldin, the politician appointed by Trump to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, oversees ruinous deregulation schemes that insure the spread of mercury, “forever chemicals” and sundry lethal toxins across the American biosphere.

MAHA was always a gauzy construct, serving less as a movement for change than as a handy instrument of deception by manipulative politicians like Trump and his acolyte Kennedy. When Bobby abandoned everything that his family had represented for half a century and pledged fealty to a crooked authoritarian, the eventual denouement should have been obvious. A man who sells out his family legacy is certain to sell out his followers. He just got there even sooner than we expected.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators