Kennedy's Lawfare Agenda Isn't What MAGA Bargained For

A day doesn’t pass in Washington without some kind of new health controversy grabbing headlines and inviting fresh skepticism of national health authorities. 5G and brain health. Tylenol causes autism. Vaccine confusion galore. Though we survived the excesses of the COVID era and its dizzying health recommendations, those days aren’t necessarily behind us. It’s just changed flavors to be a bit more MAHA.

The almost whimsical claims advanced by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. are precisely what he did for years as a plaintiff attorney. He made it his mission to extract money from every industry possible in courtrooms and at settlement conference tables. Now he’s taken that show to the highest levels of government, and MAGA doesn’t seem to mind. But they should.

The trial lawyer playbook is simple: create enough regulatory chaos and public doubt about normal consumer products to make settlements attractive to corporate legal departments, regardless of scientific merit.

Kennedy made his impressive wealth doing this, well beyond his family’s fortunes.

This is where MAHA and MAGA diverge. Trump’s coalition wants a smaller federal government and deregulation. They aim to cut red tape and let businesses operate with less meddling from federal agencies. Kennedy’s agenda demands the opposite: more regulation, more government intervention, and even more bureaucratic intrusion into what Americans eat, drink, and how they medicate themselves. Consider the overnight ban on synthetic food dyes or the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) increasing reluctance to approve life-saving new drugs. And who knows what will happen with his plans to halt water fluoridation.

As we’ve seen in the last year, elevating Make American Healthy Again means expanding a different version of the administrative nanny state that MAGA voters sent Trump to dismantle.

A recent YouGov survey found that 50 percent of Americans do not trust Kennedy to make the best decisions for Americans’ health. Just 36 percent approve of his job performance. Republican voters, as it turns out, care more about the price of eggs than whether they’re organic. RFK’s blockbuster changes to the food pyramid may be welcome, but they don’t move the needle for Americans trying to afford healthier foods.

All the while, Kennedy’s groundwork attacking food companies, aspirin makers, and now cell phone makers is giving direct ammunition to his former partners and colleagues in the ambulance-chasing industry, including his former firm, Morgan & Morgan. The firm was recently hired by the City of San Francisco to launch a major lawsuit against the makers of Fruit Loops, Cheerios, and sodas for “poisoning” the American people.

Kennedy’s approach enriches plaintiff attorneys while creating regulatory uncertainty for consumers. That’s a major problem.

If there’s anything you can say about Trump with confidence, it’s that he likes winners — and he hates lawfare. Kennedy’s MAHA experiment increasingly looks like chum for the lawsuit machine, aligning more with wealthy lawyers than everyday people. It may be time to rethink the MAHA-MAGA alliance.

Yaël Ossowski writes about legal reform and is the deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center.

This article was published on PolicyJab.