Trump’s Agriculture Bailout Is Alienating His MAHA Base

“I think there’s been a large misconception in the Republican Party, thinking that the constituents don’t really care about these issues,” Kelly Ryerson, one of the organizers of the petition, told Grist. “A key part” of the MAHA agenda, Ryerson continued, “is removing corporate interests from our regulators.”

“If anything, the EPA is significantly worse off in this administration than it was during the Biden administration,” she added. “And that is something that really frustrates tons and tons of voters that came along with this promise.”

The coalition’s ire, however, seems to be only aimed at Zeldin (who recently teased his own forthcoming MAHA agenda). Ryerson has nothing but praise for other leaders in the administration—Kennedy, Rollins, and the president himself. Last Wednesday, Kennedy and Rollins announced a pilot program that will direct $700 million toward supporting regenerative agriculture, which Ryerson cited as one example of the administration’s commitment to cleaning up the nation’s food system.

All the while, the administration’s support for industrial farms, which are the major users of toxic pesticides, has far outweighed its support for farms that practice more planet-friendly methods. Ryerson freely admits this; she said that factory farming “has dominated agriculture, and we all know it’s a really inconvenient fact, but we all know that it’s killed our soil.” Still, she said, the problem lies with the EPA.

“The MAHA movement,” Ryerson continued, “we would love to see a complete overhaul of our ag system that is just spending this ridiculously obscene amount of money on subsidies for products that aren’t even really food for us at all.”

And yet, Trump shows no signs of abandoning his billion-dollar farm bailout playbook—propping up the very pesticide-sustaining system that MAHA is rallying against.