A Lightening of the Gloom? The US Midterm Election
As someone who was closely involved in the Kennedy campaign of 2023-24, I get calls occasionally from reporters asking me about MAHA and US politics. Generally speaking, the story they are looking for is that the movement is fractured and that it is abandoning Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
While that narrative is partly true, it misses deeper social and political implications that are illegible through the lens of partisan factionalism. The real story is not whether MAHA voters will swing back toward the Democrats, remain loyal to the Republicans, or stay home. I do think they will mostly abandon the Republicans—and with good reason—but to understand why we must rewind the tape and look at MAHA’s origin in RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign.
That campaign was not primarily about health. I remember because I was his speechwriter and, especially in the early days before October 2023, had substantial influence on the candidate’s policy positions, platform, and messaging. Our flagship issue was peace. We called for massive cuts in military spending, an end to the “forever wars,” and unwinding the military empire with its 800 bases worldwide. In speech after speech, the candidate described all the things America could have accomplished with the $8 trillion it spent on the post-9/11 regime-change wars. We could repair our infrastructure, we could restore the solvency of Social Security, we could offer free childcare, we could restore the middle class.
Health was a prominent issue as well, but it was not limited to the healthcare system. It was more about toxic pollution, agriculture, and the food system—chemicals in food, water, and the environment, plastics, PFAs, and endocrine disrupters. Vaccines were hardly mentioned, except when media cornered the candidate. The main theme was to reverse the chronic disease epidemic—an issue that touches every nearly every family in the United States.
A third main issue was civil liberties, particularly the trampling of the Constitution during the Covid lockdown era, along with the related issue of an unaccountable and corrupt government. Kennedy promised to respect the Constitution and end the weaponization of the Justice Department and federal agencies that accelerated during the Biden years.
Overarching all of these issues was the campaign rallying cry: Heal the Divide. We spoke of a unifying populist movement bringing right and left together to restore the country to its people. We spoke of setting a different tone, where civility and courtesy would replace vitriol and rancor. People are tired of the hate, tired of the division, we said, tired of the hyper-partisanship that is tearing the country apart. Bobby promised to appoint a “cabinet of rivals” emulating that of Abraham Lincoln, including Democrats and Republicans, to usher in an era of reconciliation. This, along with the peace issue, was the theme that electrified audiences across the country.
By October 2023 Kennedy had risen to around 25% in national polls, despite relentless negative coverage in the mainstream media. We did not rise to 25% by courting health freedom activists. We tapped into a real populism. When political pundits speak of “MAHA”—the 3 or 4 percent of voters who moved with Kennedy into the Trump camp—they vastly understate the magnitude of a political force the still lies latent in America.
Beyond the hard core of “anti-vaxxers” (a slur that obscures valid and important concerns about vaccine safety and their role in the autoimmune/allergy epidemic), this huge segment of the electorate was drawn to the message of peace, unity, and transpartisanship. Not surprising when nearly half of all voters currently identify as neither Republican nor Democrat—a sign of public rejection of a two-party establishment that upholds none of those values.
All of this must be considered when speaking of MAHA and Trump, because the Trump administration, with the eager complicity of the Republican Congress, has betrayed nearly all of the issues the RFK Jr. ran on—many of which Donald Trump himself echoed in his campaign.
First and most obvious is peace. During the campaign and for years prior, Donald Trump has ridiculed the stupidity of the endless wars in the Middle East. He promised not to start any new ones, and to end the Ukrainian proxy war against Russia as well. More than anything else, this is what won the support not only of explicitly MAHA voters, but of those who came to Kennedy for reasons beyond “health.” The fact that leading neocons and war hawks opposed his candidacy during the primary made many of us think that he would defy them, along with the deep state that had conspired against him from the moment he entered office in 2017.
Instead of defying the deep state, Trump commandeered it, Once despised by the neocons, Trump became their darling when he launched a catastrophic new war on Iran, on a pretext so flimsy that I can’t remember what it is. Something about “preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” Meanwhile, he has prolonged the Ukraine war or the Israeli wars in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza (if the latter can be called a war at all instead of a slaughter). With a few notable exceptions, everyone I know from the campaign days is disgusted by the Iran war.
In hindsight, I should have anticipated this in light of the enormous amounts of money entering the Trump campaign from right-wing Zionists, who are inseparable from the neocons and the infamous “Project for a New American Century” in West Asia. Tellingly, Kennedy’s poll numbers—and campaign morale, and my influence in the campaign—began to shrink when he espoused extreme Zionist views after October 7, making him, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, “half a peace candidate.” I should have understood that Zionism is inseparable from the war agenda, because Israel is an arm of the empire, integral to the imperial project. Unfortunately, I ignored my misgivings and stuck with Bobby Kennedy, reasoning that, after all, he was better than the other two guys (Trump and Biden). Later, I hoped that Trump’s antiwar instincts would prevail over his Zionist backers and he would screw them over (as he has other former allies). That hope would have been realistic only if he had somewhere else to go; i.e., if there were another base of political support accessible to him, for example a robust peace movement that didn’t hate his guts.
The second issue that alienates MAHA from Trump and the Republicans is the environment. The movement understands that no one can be healthy if the environment is sick. The administration has filled the EPA leadership with chemical industry lobbyists (Kennedy pledged, each time to a chorus of cheers, to “slam shut the revolving door” between industry and the regulatory agencies); rolled back protection of public lands; gutted programs to help small, organic, and regenerative farmers; loosened regulations on toxic pollution; prevented any action on glyphosate and other pesticides; torpedoed the global plastics treaty, and in general aggrandized the interests of the Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Oil companies that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent his career suing. The administration’s actions are the opposite of the anti-corporate populism that helped propel RFK Jr. to 25% in the polls.
On the third issue—civil liberties and corruption—the contrast between the Kennedy message and the Trump administration’s policies is equally stark. Instead of ending the weaponization of the Justice Department, Trump has merely turned it against his own enemies. Instead of dismantling the machinery of surveillance, he has shifted its attention away from Covid dissidents and towards Palestinian rights advocates. Perhaps most disturbing is the wanton exercise of extrajudicial murder upon anyone he claims to be a “narcoterrorist.” (If you read the Bill of Rights carefully, you will discover that its protections do not only apply to citizens, but to “persons.” In spirit, the Bill of Rights is a declaration of the universal rights of man, not just a modification to the rules of governance. Even if the occupants of the boats that the US keeps sinking are indeed narcotraffickers, they still deserve due process before being sentenced to death.) Are we entering an era where the President, wielding terrifying technologies of surveillance and death, can order the murder of any human on earth at any moment at whim?
As for corruption, the magnitude of the Trump family’s profiteering, cronyism, and bald-faced self-dealing puts to shame the petty venality of the Biden family, sordid though it was. The Bidens raked in millions; the Trump family, billions. The Democratic establishment operated a global network of CIA-aligned NGOs; the Trump administration, via DOGE, has transferred power to an even more sinister AI-powered coterie of Big Tech tycoons and companies whose boards of directors are replete with “former” intel, military, and Epstein-files deep state figures.
But the biggest turnoff for former Kennedy supporters may be a matter of tone and attitude: hateful, boastful, scornful, truculent, bombastic, and just plain mean. Nothing could be more opposed to the goal of healing the divide. Those to whom that slogan appealed are disgusted by Trump’s contempt for illegal immigrants and the people of other nations. It must be remembered: most people who supported Kennedy—and most in the MAHA movement—were longtime Democrats who, along with many other Trump voters, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They are compassionate people. It is a huge error to attribute Trump’s success to the supposed bigotry of his supporters, rather than to a rejection of the reigning establishment.
All of this offers an easy formula for Democrats to win back power, but I think we should aspire to more than that. In tomorrow’s election, the Democrats will probably win a resounding victory. That is good (at least to the extent that Congress can do anything after decades of imperial presidency), because a check is sorely needed on the administration’s deranged and tyrannical actions. But the Democrats are the essence of the very establishment against which Kennedy’s supporters were revolting. The Democrats were the ones that provoked the Ukraine war and sabotaged its negotiated settlement. They were the ones that greenlit the Gaza genocide. They administered the lockdowns and mandates of the Covid era, censoring, harrassing, and debanking dissidents, and expanding the definition of “digital hate” to cover valid political dissent. They cooked up the Russiagate hoax and the lawfare against Trump. They spouted increasingly hateful and belittling views about their opponents’ supporters (a “basket of deplorables”). For a generation now, they have been just as cozy with the intelligence agencies, the Defense Department, the corporations, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Everything as the Republicans. They have stewarded the neoliberal order with its deteriorating health, decaying infrastructure, and hollowing out of the middle class. This state of affairs is what drove millions of people to support Kennedy in the first place.
The Democrats can win this election just by being less bad than Trump’s Republicans. Nothing much will change, though, until they (or perhaps some new political force) embody the authentically populist spirit that animated the early Kennedy campaign.
After the 2024 election, I told anyone who would listen in MAHA circles that it would be a mistake to become an appendage of the Republican Party, that they need us more than we need them. Your support, I said, should go to politicians, of any party, who most align with your views across a set of well-defined issues. You can set up a bidding war between the two parties, offering support to Democrats who agree to question their Big Pharma loyalty and “listen to the moms” (of vaccine-injured children), and to Republicans who adopt pro-environment positions that defy Big Ag and Big Chemical interests. That window of opportunity has vanished, and along with it has vanished MAHA’s viability as an influential political entity. We must return to the source: the wellspring that watered Kennedy’s early success in 2023.
Even though the Democrats have yet to dip into this wellspring, one senses in the prospect of their victory—following Lula’s win in Brazil and the possible end of Netanyahu’s reign in Israel—a lightening of the gloom. To be sure, neither Lula, nor Netanyahu’s opposition, nor the US Democrats offer much resistance to the imperial world order, and all remain mired in the habits of political polarization. Until that changes, we can expect this nation and the world to toggle back and forth between different factions of the same establishment, manipulated backstage by powerful elites and even more powerful unconscious social, economic, and psychopolitical forces.
Yet, with each new shifting of the wind, a momentary break in the clouds reveals the possibility of a genuinely new era. The 2024 election was one of those. While there is no doubt that Donald Trump is vain, boastful, and narcissistic, those labels do not define the man. Another side of him sometimes rises to the surface, or near it anyway. It was visible after the Butler, PA assassination attempt. I wonder what would have happened if, instead of unremitting hostility, pro-peace Democrats had decided to give him the benefit of the doubt? What would have happened if they decided not to treat him as a degenerate monster? Would he have risen to meet their invitation? When someone treats you as an irredeemable enemy, you tend to fulfill their expectations. “It takes one to make war, but two to make peace.” Attack someone and they will fight back. Who knows, maybe in a less divisive, militant political environment Trump would not have had to set up camp with the worst of the Republican neocons whom he had formerly despised and been despised by, people like Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell.
We will never know. That window (if it ever existed outside my wishful thinking) closed a long time ago. Now we must prepare for the next opportunity for political healing. Without it, nothing will change; our division underlies all our other problems.
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