Populist Science and the Discursive Politics of “Make America Healthy Again.”

• In Event: Truth Under Siege: Science in an Era of Executive Power

Abstract

In the United States, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has captured public attention. While MAHA espouses some positions supported by peer-reviewed research (e.g., ultraprocessed foods are harmful to health, environmental pollution interferes with fertility) it simultaneously promotes scientifically dubious claims (e.g., vaccines are dangerous; endocrine disruption leads to homosexuality). MAHA purports to care about environmental health, arguing for pesticide-free food and a cleaner environment for children, yet is embedded with an administration that is systematically undoing environmental health protections. How can social scientists make sense of these incongruent positions surrounding environmental health, science, and risk? To answer this question, this paper systematically examines the discursive politics of MAHA’s political arm by analyzing official government communications published during the first year of the second Trump administration. It finds that key MAHA actors root their claims in a “populist science” that speaks the language of science while claiming to disembed knowledge systems from corrupt institutions that harm ordinary people. By constructing a dichotomy between “good” and “captured” science MAHA rhetorically consolidates control over what counts as legitimate expertise. MAHA’s political discourse strategically ignores peer-reviewed evidence linking chronic disease to environmental injustices, social inequality, racism, and economic disparities, revealing MAHA’s alignment with nationalist, anti-regulatory politics. Rather than democratize risk governance, MAHA substitutes one set of institutional authorities for another. The paper demonstrates how science populism functions as a governance strategy that reconfigures the boundaries of legitimate expertise to align with nationalist and anti-regulatory politics.

Author

• Norah MacKendrick, Rutgers University-New Brunswick