RFK Jr.’s barnstorming the country for the GOP

RFK Jr.’s barnstorming the country for the GOP The health secretary toured the heartland this week while Trump nominated a loyal aide to lead one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agencies. 08/21/2026 06:50 PM EDT Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s August isn’t your typical summer break from Washington: In the last week, he’s podcasted with The Incredible Hulk and fished for bream with the GOP candidate for governor in Iowa. He’s touted fitness with one embattled House Republican in a Des Moines suburb and he praised Nebraskans’ response to a hantavirus outbreak in a competitive Omaha district. The Health secretary’s barnstorming aims to fulfill the hopes President Donald Trump placed in him when he hired the longtime Democrat to run the Health and Human Services Department last year. The White House believes the Trump-Kennedy alliance will boost turnout for Republicans in the midterms. “‘Bobby Unleashed’ is our motto in the West Wing,” a White House official said. “We want him guns blazing.” But while Kennedy might enjoy that latitude on the campaign trail, supporters of his Make America Healthy Again agenda view him as far more constrained in advancing his policies in Washington. The administration’s recent picks to fill vacant Health Department jobs atop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration enraged leaders of Kennedy’s MAHA movement for their lack of bona fides crusading against vaccine mandates or restricting pesticide use. Neither appointee has prior Kennedy ties. The Health Department’s policy moves to rid the food system of chemical additives, such as a recent proposal to require companies to disclose new ingredients, have likewise underwhelmed his supporters who cite Kennedy’s pledges to go further. A recent executive order underscored Trump’s determination to change vaccine policy, but Kennedy-backed efforts to reduce recommended vaccinations — he was an anti-vaccine activist before working for Trump — remain blocked by the courts. MAHA devotees were particularly infuriated by another Trump order in February protecting glyphosate production. The herbicide has been linked to cancer. Kennedy supporters point to all that as evidence the White House is pushing Kennedy’s appeal on the campaign trail but holding him back on policy, amid fights with the farm and pharma industries and the lawmakers dependent on them. “He’s going to be unleashed to talk about his issues because it’s always wildly popular. But he’s still, in my opinion, going to have to stay in line with what the administration wants,” said Kelly Ryerson, a longtime Kennedy ally and MAHA activist who has met with senior White House officials on pesticide policy. “The momentum has definitely slowed around these issues,” Ryerson said. Alex Clark, a MAHA influencer and Republican, worries the GOP risks losing votes over its breaks with the movement — a concern she regularly airs to the White House and on social media. She says MAHA supporters are questioning if Kennedy has “put down his boxing gloves.” “They’re wondering… Why are you just kind of seemingly keeping your head down and not fighting our battles for us? Isn’t that why we fought for you? Isn’t that why we voted for Trump so that you could do these things for us?” Clark said. That’s the narrative the White House seeks to counter by sending Kennedy — a member of America’s most famous Democratic family — around the country to preach his accomplishments alongside vulnerable Republican lawmakers. Kennedy has visited 19 states since launching his “Take Back Your Health” campaign in Pennsylvania in January, talking about MAHA policies like the updated dietary guidelines for Americans and railing against a chronic disease epidemic. His travel has accelerated as the midterms inch nearer: Over the past week, he visited three states, holding at least one event a day across Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota. In Iowa, Kennedy popped up in a vulnerable Republican’s district to talk about threats to children’s health. He rallied with the GOP candidate for governor, Zach Lahn, a MAHA-endorsed farmer who has made health risks from pesticides part of his platform. “Iowans are really conscious of health issues,” Kennedy said Wednesday in Dubuque, where Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin meet at the Mississippi River. “They value their health, the air, the water, and the welfare of their children.” Kennedy’s popularity is key to bringing in independent voters who care about bipartisan issues like improving children’s health or cleaning up the food system, said one Republican National Committee official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the GOP’s midterm strategy. He remains one of the most requested Cabinet secretaries in competitive districts that are likely to decide which party controls Congress next year, the official said. “He’s definitely an effective messenger because the MAHA movement expands beyond Republicans,” the official said. Trump’s aides credit the movement with helping the president return to the White House by supporting a new coalition in 2024. The White House says it still values that alliance. Recent policy rollouts to better track the chemicals in food and the Trump executive order discouraging states from having school vaccine mandates are evidence that the White House realizes “how important it is to continue to message to this constituency heading into the midterms,” the White House official said. In a statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai defended the administration’s dedication to MAHA not just as a “campaign slogan” but as a “pledge to tackle America’s chronic disease epidemic.” “Secretary Kennedy is rightfully going to tout these victories for the American people and keep delivering more of them in the coming weeks and months,” he said. HHS defended the secretary’s team as having delivered “hundreds of consequential actions,” and said Kennedy was “taking those wins directly to communities across the country — showing Americans what this Administration has already accomplished, hearing from them firsthand, and building momentum for the work ahead.” But some of the leaders of Kennedy’s grassroots movement aren’t buying it, particularly as they see leadership positions inside HHS filled with people they view as a departure from Kennedy’s initial, MAHA-forward team. Trump’s announcement that he nominated Heidi Overton, White House deputy assistant for domestic policy and a physician, to be the next commissioner of the FDA, drew hefty criticism — and kicked off a social media feud between Clark and Desai. MAHA advocates like Clark shunned Overton’s work on an executive order that shored up the domestic supply of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. The order handed a win to the pesticide industry and drove a wedge between the administration and the movement. Desai defended Overton against the attacks, calling her a MAHA “warrior” and key proponent of “pretty much every MAHA win by this Administration.” “Heidi 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,” Desai said. “This President, White House, and Admin are absolutely committed to MAHA,” he wrote. Clark wasn’t sold. “To say Heidi is the most capable fighter we have is absurd on its face. That title goes to Secretary Kennedy while he’s being sandwiched in between people who share none of his values,” she wrote. Overton’s appointment comes on the heels of another Trump pick for HHS leadership that MAHA didn’t endorse: Erica Schwartz, recently confirmed to lead the CDC. Schwartz oversaw policies encouraging vaccination while she ran the U.S. Coast Guard’s health system, and during her confirmation hearing last month repeatedly said vaccines are safe and effective — red flags for some who backed Kennedy’s movement for his pledges to downsize the childhood vaccine schedule. Many MAHA activists cheered Trump’s recent executive order that ran up against Schwartz’s support for vaccines, instead doubling down on the president’s personal determination to reduce the number of vaccines children get and break up combined shots into individual ones, linking — without evidence — vaccines to rising diagnoses of autism. But the order has limited impact. Kennedy’s attempts to overhaul an independent panel of vaccine experts, who advise the CDC on the childhood vaccine schedule, and encourage parents to vaccinate their children for fewer diseases, were halted by a Massachusetts court in March. The changes are on ice while the lawsuit plays out. Many doctors say they’ll follow guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is fighting Kennedy’s changes in court, regardless. Trump’s August vaccine executive order didn’t change that. “The key thing for the president is to get this information out there,” a White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the contours of the executive order, said after it was signed. “The lawsuit is a separate issue.” Kennedy’s supporters acknowledge the executive order’s limitations and the hamstrung efforts of the administration to change vaccination recommendations so far. “Do I feel that he has done the best that he can in terms of trying again and again to insert flexibility into the system against great odds, and has he achieved everything that he’s wanted to? No,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit that opposes vaccine mandates. “But he has helped to elevate this conversation that needs to take place,” she said. The order revived attention to the issue, and recently released CDC data showing a rise in exemptions for childhood vaccinations while immunization rates continue to decline suggest Kennedy and Trump’s vaccine skepticism has had a cultural impact. Molly O’Shea, a Michigan pediatrician and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said she has seen an increase in parents who want to hold off on vaccinating their children ever since Kennedy pledged last year to determine the causes for rising autism diagnoses in the U.S. “There is the skepticism about brick and mortar, traditional, peer-reviewed evidence that didn’t exist five years ago in the same way and like any other, really frankly, marketing thing, the more you hear it, the more true it sounds, whether it’s true or not,” O’Shea said. “It does demand of us the ongoing repeating of the alternate message, which is based in scientific fact, about the safety, the value, and the protection that vaccines provide.” In many respects, the most clear-cut example of Kennedy’s influence is on food policy, where he has changed the guidelines that describe a healthy American diet, gotten many companies that sell artificially dyed products to commit to reducing or eliminating them, and proposed changes to the FDA’s review process for new food ingredients. But that is far from the systematic changes Kennedy has called for, like defining ultra-processed foods that he says are responsible for the chronic disease epidemic in America, and introducing European-style front-of-package labeling that indicate what products are healthy. MAHA activist Ryerson said she was pleased to see the FDA recently ask food manufacturers to disclose new food ingredients, but that it “needs to be pushed further.” Kennedy has long criticized the FDA’s system, known as the Generally Recognized as Safe standard, which intended to allow food makers to add well-known ingredients like salt and water without safety reviews, for allowing companies to introduce less well-known ingredients without having to prove they’re safe first. The new FDA proposal doesn’t mandate any new safety testing, as that would require a law from Congress. But the proposal would ask food makers to notify the FDA of new additives. The health secretary has pledged harder-hitting policies like creating a definition for ultra-processed foods that could be a significant step toward restrictions. He’s also supported a petition filed by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler that would force companies to prove certain ingredients are safe for people to eat. Many in the MAHA movement expected to see those policies rolled out alongside the new one. “Where’s the ultra-processed food definition that you told us we were getting a few months ago on Joe Rogan?” Clark asked, referring to Kennedy’s comments that there would be a definition “by April,” followed by “front-of-package food labeling.” Dasha Burns and Marcia Brown contributed to this report.