The makeshift alliance between the Make America Healthy Again movement and Donald Trump’s administration is on increasingly shaky ground.
Some MAHA activists are publicly opposing the president’s appointment of his aide Heidi Overton to lead the Food and Drug Administration, fearing she isn’t a fierce enough advocate for their movement to repair trust already broken by the Trump administration.
Alexis Clark, a MAGA advocate and one of Turning Point USA’s most popular podcasters, for example, blasted Overton on X, urging her followers to “rise up,” the Washington Post first reported.
“I want the administration to be in good favor with these [MAHA] voters and these mothers,” Clark told the Post.
“And this is the type of behavior that they see and they see it as this administration is not weeding out compromised individuals from our three-letter agencies [like] we were promised. And so they’re losing enthusiasm.”
The influencer blamed Overton, a deputy assistant to the president, for an executive order Trump issued in February promoting the use of glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller. MAHA supporters have long argued that the chemical is dangerous and have backed thousands of lawsuits involving Roundup, an herbicide originally manufactured by Monsanto.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai publicly sparred with Clark over her claims, writing on X that Overton “was only looped in at the end of this EO’s very close-hold process when she pushed as many MAHA-minded edits as possible to a mostly-baked EO that, again, was written with national security considerations in mind.”
Still, a large faction of the movement that helped land Trump back in power remains unconvinced. A campaign alliance with Trump and failed presidential candidate and MAHA leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. landed him the role of health secretary, but activists feel their MAGA mouthpiece has been stifled.
Nowhere is that more clear than in the case of Roundup. Kennedy previously argued that Monsanto knew glyphosate caused cancer—and helped secure a $289 million jury verdict against the company in 2018, according to the New York Times.
“The herbicide Glyphosate is one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic. Much more widely used here than in Europe,” Kennedy wrote on X in June 2024, while he was campaigning for president. A spokesperson from HHS did not respond to a press inquiry from the Daily Beast.
In July, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto against plaintiffs who alleged the product caused cancer and were seeking millions in damages, further enraging MAHA activists.
“For decades, Republicans have preached about the importance of states’ rights and ‘pro-life values,’ but today’s ruling in favor of Bayer-Monsanto’s right to shield themselves from cancer lawsuits is more proof that this is just empty rhetoric from a morally bankrupt party and a Supreme Court that continues to put corporate profits over the health of Americans,” David Murphy, a former director on Kennedy’s failed presidential campaign and the founder of United We Eat, told the Daily Beast last month.
Overton, for her part, has not publicly voiced her stance on the matter. An alum of conservative think tank The America First Policy Institute, Overton does, however, share similar values with some of the MAHA movement’s more extreme activists.
At one Oval Office event, the board-certified physician stood beside Trump as he claimed without evidence that vaccines are linked to rising autism rates. Overton has also vocally opposed abortion pills, which, as FDA director, she would have the power to make more inaccessible, the Associated Press first reported.
“Dr. Heidi has been a ROCKSTAR in my Administration,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post announcing her nomination. “We need her leadership at the FDA now to ensure that the U.S. remains the WORLD LEADER for Scientific Discovery and CURES.”
