Even before President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in a bombing campaign against the Iranian regime, many within the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement were already souring on the Trump administration.
But the decision to engage U.S. forces in another foreign conflict in the Middle East is, for some, an outright breaking point – and, they say, Republicans should be on notice that MAHA voters are unlikely to support the GOP in the upcoming 2026 midterms.
“No nation that does horrible things abroad, wages war, unjust wars, and besets violence on the world can actually be healthy,” Charles Eisenstein, an author and environmentalist who served as the chief speechwriter for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential bid, told Scripps News in an interview Wednesday. “What we do to the world, in some sense, we do to ourselves.”
Eisenstein is among a group of Kennedy campaign alumni involved in a new “Health Not War” effort organizing voters against Trump’s Iran action and calling on lawmakers to back congressional War Powers Resolutions that would limit the president’s ability to continue the conflict without congressional approval.
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“We, the undersigned, are American citizens who care deeply about the health of our nation: both its physical health of its people, and the moral health of its conduct in the world,” the petition begins. “We understand that these are related. Neither can stand without the other.”
Organizers acknowledged the campaign has room to grow. Eisenstein said the number of signers as of Wednesday evening was in the “thousands,” though that did little to stop Republicans from blocking Democrats’ War Powers vote on Wednesday evening (a similar vote is scheduled for later Thursday in the House, where it’s likewise expected to fail).
“It was kind of a short runway to really launch any kind of campaign,” Eisenstein said, noting activists first announced the effort just a few days ago.
But he promised this was not the end of MAHA’s anti-war push.
“We're going to continue to advocate for peace,” he said.
Kennedy allies push anti-war effort
Beyond Eisenstein, other Kennedy allies involved in the “Heath Not War” campaign include David Murphy, a food and farming activist who served as finance director for Kennedy’s presidential bid, and Meryll Nass, M.D., a longtime Kennedy ally who works with the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense.
“This is a war of choice,” Nass told Scripps News. “This was a war that really went against what the president himself had said.”
For Nass, the goal of the campaign is not only to convince lawmakers to support measures curbing Trump’s power to further the conflict, but also to highlight what she describes as a series of broken promises by the Trump administration when it comes to MAHA topics.
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“[Trump] needs some pressure on him to do what he said his presidency was going to be about, which was both ‘Make America Great Again’, put ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” Nass said. “He's done a number of things that fly in the face of all of that.”
Murphy – a self-described “former Republican” who runs United We Eat, a MAHA-aligned group advocating against the commercialization of food and agriculture – said the Trump administration’s moves in Iran reminded him of actions by “neocons” like former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, going so far as to suggest the president may be trying to distract from other administration failings.
“Is this really the Trump administration, President Trump's ‘Wag the Dog’ moment?” Murphy posed. “Are they trying to get away from the Epstein story? Are they trying to change, you know, the negative stories that are going on in the press with glyphosate and Bayer and pesticides, overwhelming it with a fake, urgent need to launch a war on some imaginary nuclear threat that Iran does not pose?”
MAHA and the midterms
It’s not just the Iran war that has MAHA mad.
MAHA activists who spoke to Scripps News pointed to a host of moves by the Trump administration in recent months they said directly contradicted promises Trump and Kennedy made on the campaign trail.
Among their grievances: the decision to back biotech giants Bayer and Monsanto in their Supreme Court bid to kill lawsuits against them for illnesses allegedly caused by their pesticide products; the EPA’s reapproval of three dicamba-based herbicides opposed by MAHA groups; and Trump’s recent executive order aiming to boost domestic production of glyphosate, a prominent weedkiller more commonly known as Roundup that’s long been alleged to be carcinogenic.
“It's not even mixed anymore, I would say that it has been an anti-MAHA agenda since December 1,” Nass argued.
Such moves risk turning off MAHA-aligned voters said to be central to Trump’s win in 2024.
“There's no question that [Kennedy’s] involvement in the Trump campaign was pivotal in the election of President Trump,” former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who served as Kennedy’s campaign manager during his Democratic presidential bid and remains a close ally, told Scripps News.
“I think [Republicans] should have increasingly growing concern,” Murphy echoed.
A polling memo late last year from Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, Trump’s pollsters in his 2024 run, found 44% of Americans self-identified as MAHA supporters, and most priorities within the movement – with the notable exception of eliminating vaccine recommendations – were broadly popular.
And a more recent analysis by Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action and a leading voice within MAHA, was more blunt:
“[T]he Republican party is renting MAHA voters,” Lyons wrote, drawing on Fabrizio’s public opinion research. “They haven’t decided to purchase them yet.”
Asked about such concerns, the officials working with Kennedy in the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment.
The White House, for its part, brushed aside any suggestion of a MAHA-MAGA schism, on Iran or otherwise.
“President Trump can walk and chew gum at the same time,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told Scripps News in a statement. “While the U.S. military wrecks the Iranian terrorist regime, the Trump administration remains laser-focused here at home to deliver on the President’s MAHA agenda: from cracking down on artificial ingredients in our food supply to revising federal Dietary Guidelines to finally lowering prescription drug prices.”
Kennedy’s power proves limited
While many within the movement still view Kennedy positively, particularly his handling of issues of health and wellness, they acknowledged that his power is limited.
“I know Secretary Kennedy, and I stay in touch with him on medical issues. He has no authority over this war,” Nass said. “What's the point of talking to him about it?”
“Secretary Kennedy is, and has been, the captain of his own ship,” echoed Kucinich. “His service in the cabinet is circumscribed within questions relating to health, and that's what he does.”
But while MAHA voters may have been willing to swallow other concerns about the Trump administration’s policies in exchange for Kennedy’s ascendance to the cabinet, for some, the Iran conflict is a bridge too far.
“The warmongering, I mean, for me that trumps all the rest,” Eisenstein told Scripps News. “There is no way I will ever support a candidate who is embroiling the country in new regime change wars.”
