As Trump moves to undo decades of work—begun by Republican President Richard Nixon—to protect people and nature from toxic chemicals, two recent pro-polluter policies are especially likely to harm his own voters.
Last week, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency—when will they rename it?—rolled back Biden-era limits on the amount of mercury pollution that coal plants can emit. Mercury can cause serious neurological damage to kids, especially babies (including unborn babies, another group this president has at times professed to care about). Other health problems associated with exposure to even small amounts of mercury include kidney and nervous system damage. For all these reasons, the World Health Organization recommends not using coal at all.
The majority of babies endangered by the rollback on mercury live in red states. The states with the largest number of coal plants—Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, according to January 2026 data from Global Energy Monitor—voted overwhelmingly for Trump in both 2016 and 2024.
Indeed, Trump’s supporters could be pardoned for thinking the president has it out for them, as the coal rollback wasn’t the president’s only act of chilling disregard for their well-being. The same day as the EPA loosened mercury restrictions, Trump signed an executive order prioritizing the production of glyphosate, a toxic herbicide, nonsensically calling it essential to national security, and offering its manufacturer a degree of “immunity” from liability.
Numerous legal findings and a large body of research attest to glyphosate’s links to a range of health problems, including lung and kidney disease, gut disease, and hormonal disruption. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has for a decade considered the herbicide a “probable carcinogen,” with a specific link to lymphoma. Last year, Bayer, the company that makes glyphosate, warned it would stop U.S. production unless the government made changes to shield it from lawsuits. Trump’s administration, never having met a toxic chemical it wanted to regulate, has apparently been happy to oblige. The administration has also filed a brief on behalf of Bayer in a liability case scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court in April.
Like coal pollution, any damage from glyphosate will hit rural areas hardest. The chemical’s heaviest use is in agriculture, and a 2022 study of its geographical concentration by NBC News found that the U.S. county with the highest glyphosate usage rate was Nueces County, Texas, which voted overwhelmingly for the current president, as well as for Senator Ted Cruz and other Republicans. The second-, third-, and fourth-most glyphosate-drenched counties—San Patricio County and Lynn County in Texas, and Mississippi County in Arkansas—also vote solidly Republican.
There’s a particular nihilism to this. Trump and his supporters have never seemed to care about poor people of color, an indifference easily explained by the combination of racism and traditional conservative callousness that has long animated many in the Republican Party. But this second administration is advancing a more broadly anti-human ethos. Trump and those around him seem to be so deeply opposed to all forms of solidarity that they cannot even be bothered to protect their own.
These moves to literally poison Trump’s own base suggest a transition from the exuberant collective (OK, a bit fascistic) vibe of Trump campaign rallies, toward something even darker and weirder, closer to what writer Max Read recently dubbed the Suicide Right. In this view, Trump and his actions seem spitefully misanthropic, like those of a mass shooter or the 2004 “Killdozer,” a Colorado man named Marvin Heemeyer who, fed up over a zoning dispute, used a modified bulldozer to demolish 13 buildings and most of his town’s business district before shooting himself. Granted, the terrifying, all-too-easy to visualize image of Killdozer on the rampage hits most of us quite differently than Trump’s quiet and invisible assent to mass poisoning does. But Heemeyer, like our president an online icon to many alienated men, is still a sound metaphor for our current right-wing, school-shooter politics. If the comparison seems like a stretch—and by the way, Killdozer didn’t actually kill anyone, though witnesses believe he intended to—it only shows how much trouble we have conceptualizing ecological and public health crime, a persistent barrier to holding thugs like Trump and EPA head Lee Zeldin accountable.
Assuming most people don’t think deregulating poison is “based,” these moves could have political blowback for Republicans. As we’ve seen from the grassroots popularity of both the traditionally liberal environmental movement and, more recently, the right-coded Make America Healthy Again movement, people across the political spectrum want to protect their kids and themselves from toxins. Indeed, in December several leaders and influencers in the MAHA movement asked President Trump to fire Zeldin, citing his moves to loosen restrictions on harmful pesticides and other chemicals. A petition circulating by some MAHA activists on social media and signed by more than 15,000 people said Zeldin “has prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children.” A note appended last month adds some conciliatory language about a “collaborative relationship to advance the MAHA agenda at EPA,” but the petition calling for Zeldin’s removal is still online.
The problem is bigger than Lee Zeldin, though. It’s Trump and his whole administration, whose profound lack of care even for the health of its most fervent supporters is reason enough to fire them all. Perhaps in the coming elections, some red-state voters will think so, too. That would be a step in the right direction. Who wants to be saturated in glyphosate and mercury? But electoral loss hardly seems like sufficient accountability for knowingly poisoning people. For the Suicide Right, I imagine part of what’s iconic about Killdozer is that he escaped punishment. There, too, Trump and his minions seem to be on the same path. That evasion of justice may threaten our civilization even more than coal mining and herbicides.
