Can the MAGA/MAHA Coalition Hold?

Perhaps, but Trump Derangement threatens to break us apart!

"We must all hang together, or most certainly we will all hang separately!”
–Ben Franklin

I don’t think there is any doubt that the addition of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA troop of true believers to the MAGA base made a crucial difference in Trump’s “Too Big to Rig” victory last fall. Trump has been as good as his word, appointing RFK Jr. to the most powerful Health position in the Cabinet, and has followed that up with mostly solid appointments to various subsidiary positions.

Together the new team has been making great progress rooting out the pernicious influence of Big Pharma on the regulatory structure. The wholesale firing of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee last week, followed by the appointment of a very solid new committee should encourage all who want to see America Made Healthy Again. Their first meeting yesterday was a huge sea change from business as usual!

And yet, Trump’s policies in other arenas threaten to fray the coalition. Trump’s steadfast support of Israel and the recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear plants seems to have brought out the latent Trump Derangement Syndrome that seems to linger in so many.

I am seeing this first-hand in my Facebook feed. Because I was a strong opponent of the Covid vaccines, and particularly vaccine mandates, I have accumulated 100s of Facebook friends who share my views on those subjects.

I even started a private Facebook group called “Discrimination against the Unvaxxed in NYS” in conjunction with my federal litigation against the NYS Health Department. (See this Substack for info about that ill-fated lawsuit.)

There are over 400 members of that group, most of whom I have never met in person, but many of whom have also become personal Facebook friends. I was quite surprised when many of these folks began to get extremely concerned about Trump’s foreign policy in recent weeks. ( I wrote about some of this in my most recent column on “Panicans.”

I began to see wild accusations about Trump being controlled by Israel, Trump being a warmonger who would lead us into an invasion of Iran, Trump bankrupting the nation on military expenses so that the economy would collapse, that Trump’s bombing of Iran was Unconstitutional, (Hint: It’s not!), etc.

No doubt these concerns have been fed by a number of factors:

1. There is strong evidence that unfriendly nations have been manipulating our social media conversations by using highly sophisticated bots to spread dissent.

2. NeoCon-controlled media (I am looking at you Fox News!) have been pushing for full-scale war with Iran by giving lots of press to War Hawks such as Sen. Lindsay Graham and Mark Levin, making a lot of people nervous.

3. Leading Conservative commentators such as Tucker Carlson and many others have been warning us that Trump is leading us into disaster.

4. And of course, what’s left of the legacy media keeps up a steady drumbeat of Anti-Trump propaganda for those few still watching.

Frankly, I think a lot of the controversy on the Conservative side is being driven more by the highly competitive battle for online views than it is by honest concern. There is a definite market for anti-Trump rhetoric, and if you already have strong Conservative support, the only way to expand your audience is to try to bring in some of the Trump haters.

This is a dangerous trend. If people like what Trump, RFK Jr. and others are doing in the MAHA fight, they need to be a little more circumspect in criticizing his other policies. Nobody is perfect, but falling into a state of paranoid suspicion about everything he does will bring us all to ruin.

Let’s keep our eye on the ball. If we want the important work of Making America Healthy Again to continue, it’s going to take more than 4 years. We have chronic problems in this area and they will not disappear overnight.

It is important that the MAGA/MAHA coalition hang together to win the Mid-Term elections next year and retain the Presidency Post-Trump. If you don’t think that Big Pharma is salivating over the prospect of regaining control of their regulators, I have a slightly used nuclear plant in Iran I want to sell you. Cheap!