Rolling Stone40%
Trump Tried to Appease MAHA Over Roundup. It Backfired 74%
By Ayurella Horn-Muller29% Grist88%
7/18/2026, 1:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 27.9% saturation with 260 hits. Analysis detected 1,771 faulty-reasoning hits from 931 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 65.4% and a BS Rank of 74% (5,894 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 73.10% of the article peer group.
The coalition of voters who helped elect Trump are growing increasingly disenchanted with the president
MAHA's disenchantment with the Trump administration has much to do with its open support of Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular pesticide Roundup, which just won a Supreme Court case over the claim that the company failed to adequately warn users about the cancer risk of its weedkiller.
First, the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case.
Then, in February, the president signed an executive order that classified glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup key to national security and called for increased domestic production of the chemical.
In March, it was reported that top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency met with Bayer’s CEO to discuss “litigation” issues.
The following month, the administration sent a lawyer to argue on behalf of the chemical company in a Supreme Court hearing.
Just hours after the decision was released, Trump signed an executive order framed as boosting regenerative agriculture and American farm resilience.
(Broadly speaking, the term “regenerative agriculture” refers to farming methodologies that boost soil health and its potential for carbon capture, though there is no federal standard or definition like there is for “organic,” leaving it open to interpretation — and, in some cases, greenwashing.)
The contradictions between the two actions have sparked a new barrage of criticisms from MAHA voters.
“It does seem a little schizophrenic,” said Engelhart.
“None of us can be a one-issue voter anymore…I don’t think that anybody is just going to blindly go and vote for one party or another,” she added.
That sentiment is already showing up in the data, though the picture is far from clear-cut.
Polling results from last October found that roughly 74 percent of MAHA-supporters identified as Republicans, with 59 percent also identifying as Make America Great Again supporters — the president’s most loyal base.
Meanwhile, a POLITICO poll conducted this spring revealed that 47 percent of self-identified MAHA respondents who voted for Trump believe the administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again.”
And a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 28 percent of MAHA voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way the administration is handling food and vaccine policy, which may affect turnout in the midterm elections that could decide control of Congress.
Limiting pesticide use, however, remains one of the movement’s defining causes, with 94 percent of MAHA adherents in favor of reducing exposure to harmful chemicals.
South Dakota farmer Jonathan Lundgren was at the White House on the day that the Supreme Court ruling was announced.
Days earlier, he’d been invited to the Rose Garden for a dinner recognizing farmers and was asked to join Trump in the Oval Office for the signing of the regenerative agriculture executive order.
Lundgren raises bees, sheep, and poultry, and grows flowers and apples on a 50-acre regenerative farm in Estelline, South Dakota.
Like Engelhart, he shirks the political implication of identifying as MAHA, but considers himself aligned with the pro-regenerative agriculture and anti-pesticide faction of the movement.
“They needed some farmer faces to kind of give the whole thing a spin,” he said.
Lundgren called the executive order “meaningful,” though it’s not lost on him that it doesn’t introduce new funding or regulations.
Experts say it doesn’t do much at all.
“It may sound great, but fundamentally, there’s nothing really new or substantive or meaningful in the EO that I can see that *actually* changes the equation for how the administration treats regenerative agriculture,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
Inside the Oval Office meeting, Lundgren watched on as Kennedy’s team swiftly mobilized to try to soften the MAHA backlash to the Supreme Court ruling with the president’s executive order, which culminated in an explosive argument between a Department of Health and Human Services official and a top farming lobbyist who was concerned that the order would imply that there are safety issues in the U.S. food supply.
Lundgren himself stopped using Roundup about eight years ago when he noticed that agrochemicals were “causing more problems than they were solving” on his farm.
But he can’t escape the downwind effects of nearby farms that spray it.
Right now, he’s watching scores of bees slow down before outright dying, and his orchard’s leaves cup from herbicide drift.
Then there’s the human toll.
“We’re sick this time of year, and it’s a direct result of all of these pesticides being applied.
My family is sick.
That ain’t right,” Lundgren told Grist.
His daughter is grappling with asthma and allergy flare-ups while his farm staff battles recurring headaches and fatigue.
“It’s so intense that we call it in my community ‘The Spray Flu.’”
He says these dual actions by the administration, as well as the EPA’s recent approval of yet another batch of pesticides that contain PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have changed how he plans to vote in the midterms.
“We’re in a weird state right now that has never really happened before, where food safety and the health of our children is weighing very heavily on American politics,” said Lundgren.
“This is far broader than the farming community.
I think that this is consumers; I think this is parents; I think this is society at-large.”
For Ryerson, a registered independent who voted for Trump, the two actions have shifted how she plans to approach the midterms.
“I don’t care if they’re a Republican or Democrat, I’m going to support the candidate that wants to decrease toxic exposures,” she said.
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