More than 50 years ago, a German gastroenterologist showed that microscopic pieces of plastic swallowed by animals were remarkably efficient at infiltrating those animals’ intestinal linings and working their way through to their blood and lymphatic systems, then on to the brain, liver, and beyond. The Los Angeles Times’s Susanne Rust—who this week reported on that meeting and its fallout—found that the doctor’s findings had alarmed the plastics and petrochemical executives, including representatives from Dow Chemical and Exxon, who gathered to hear them at New York City’s tony Hotel Delmonico.
One executive at Union Carbide—later absorbed by Dow—lamented to fellow executives that the 1974 presentation had garnered a reputation among attendees as “a ‘horror story’ on ingesting PVC resin,” referring to polyvinyl chloride resin, still the world’s third most-used plastic polymer. For years, companies sponsored and tracked studies on the risks of plastics and vinyl chloride, a typically gaseous known human carcinogen used to produce certain types of plastics. Animals exposed at even low levels developed tumors. Workers who inhaled vinyl chloride kept developing the same rare cancer. All the while, plastics producers and their trade associations continued to push back against federal regulations and downplay risks. As one Conoco Chemical Company executive proclaimed in 1984, “We live in a sea of carcinogens and not only are we surviving—we are living longer!”
A half century later, Republicans are trying to salvage a fractious coalition that’s somehow come to include both the companies that gathered at the Hotel Delmonico and the people riled up about—among other issues—the microplastics they produce. The figurehead of the movement to Make America Healthy Again, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spent the lead-up to this year’s midterms pitching Republican candidates to his supporters, who flocked to his opposition to vaccine mandates and talk about healthy foods, at rallies around the country. Tuesday’s election will be a test of whether Republicans can manage to keep the poisoned in bed with the poisoners.
In some ways, MAHA advocates’ concerns about microplastics make perfect sense. A series of studies over the last few years has found them showing up with alarming ubiquity in human blood, brains, placentas, and testicles. Microplastics accumulating in our bodies have been linked to health problems before. A new paper published in Nature sheds light on how they do damage: When exposed to water, tiny plastic particles release chemicals known to contribute to ailments such as heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Microplastics, it seems safe to say, are making America less healthy.
In other ways, the MAHA-MAGA alliance is bizarre. According to a KFF poll published in May, some 41 percent of Americans identify with MAHA; most are Republicans and identify with MAGA, too. The GOP, however—and this administration, especially—have been exceedingly accommodating to polluters looking for a license to pollute. As microplastics gained prominence during the second Trump administration, MAHA adherents have butted heads with officials all too eager to give the companies that make them a pass.
When Trump’s EPA declined in June to add microplastics to its priority list of substances to be monitored in drinking water, the founding executive director of the MAHA-aligned Moms Across America Movement, Zen Honeycutt, expressed her group’s “deep concern about the growing threat of microplastic pollution to drinking water across the United States,” urging the agency to do more. The administration has responded to pressure over microplastics with what are to date largely symbolic measures. Kennedy’s HHS launched a $144 million “microplastics research program” in April, and the White House’s MAHA report said microplastics might be making kids sick. The EPA has agreed to study them.
There are fairly obvious reasons why Republicans aren’t taking the lead on this issue. The same companies and trade associations that have pushed to roll back pollution rules for decades also donate generously (and disproportionately) to the GOP. While polluters have long been prolific, partisan campaign donors, those gifts have seemed more nakedly transactional under the second Trump administration.
As the New York Times detailed in a recent investigation, industrial polluters started campaigning for exemptions from Biden-era pollution limits nearly as soon as Trump’s second administration began. Not long after these initial requests, the EPA set up an electronic mailbox for the “regulated community” to formally request exemptions by March 31, 2025. On March 19, political action committees for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association and the American Chemistry Council—trade associations representing the country’s largest plastics and petrochemicals manufacturers—made 13 donations totaling $50,000 to Republican candidates and Republican-aligned PACs; the same day, they sent three donations totaling $10,000 to Democrats. At the end of the month, the AFPM and ACC wrote to the EPA requesting a two-year exemption from complying with Biden-era air quality rules to limit toxins such as ethylene oxide, a “critical building block” for plastic products, according to the American Chemistry Council, and a carcinogen. In July—after many more meetings, and many, many more donations—the trade associations got what they wanted.
MAHA’s highest-profile members, at least, don’t seem eager to turn their backs on Republicans. Honeycutt spoke with Kennedy at a recent campaign rally in Iowa last week. At the same event, she posed for a photo with MAHA stalwart Calley Means, who resigned as Kennedy’s senior advisor last week, reportedly over frustrations with the pace of progress. The Secretary’s own attempts at campaigning have been something of a mix bag. While stumping for Michigan Senate hopeful Mike Rogers, Kennedy’s remarks devolved into a racist screed against Muslims. Last month’s MAHA Summit, headlined by anti-mortality guru Bryan Johnson, offered a dour picture of the movement. The event was organized by the nonprofit MAHA Center, which just so happens to be run by Robert F. Kennedy’s longtime publisher, Tony Lyons. The laundry list of corporations that funded the conference, including Wal-Mart, aren’t known for their health bona fides. Sponsors like Hims & Hers—best known for marketing GLP-1s, anti-depressants, and finasteride to insecure, aging millennials—obviously stand to profit from the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
Alarmed by this spectacle, the Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Galardi cautioned MAHA to steer away from the “dystopian religion” embodied in Johnson’s half-baked pitch to “reimagine human nature” and transcend death. MAHA’s path forward, she argued, should be paved instead by “those who believe that freedom is not found by removing all limitations, but through embracing struggle, pain, and even death to grow, change, and become the image bearers of Christ.”
It’s easy to feel flummoxed by MAHA’s continued, albeit increasingly critical, support for Republican politicians: Isn’t it obvious that a party supported so heavily by polluters will not be the party that also reins them in? But Galardi’s warning—from an institution that’s long led the way in letting companies run the government—offers some grounds for hope. Democratic candidates that really do want to take on petrochemicals producers, Big Pharma, and corporate agriculture can welcome MAHA rank-and-filers with legitimate concerns about their health, who are fed up with right-wing leaders who’ve sold them out to Dow and Bayer. That doesn’t have to mean indulging every fringe belief of self-identified Republicans and MAGA voters within a fringe, inchoate movement.
Making America healthy really is popular. KFF’s survey found that concerns about food safety and pesticides resonate well beyond those who personally identify with MAHA. Even among self-identified MAHA supporters, people cared more about bringing down the cost of healthcare than food policy or vaccines. A poll published this summer by the Ocean Conservancy found that nearly nine in 10 Americans are concerned that scientists had found microplastics in the human body; 63 percent were “very concerned.”
But just because ideas are popular doesn’t make them easy to implement. The companies filling our blood, brains, and balls with microplastics have a long track record of avoiding regulations and the fallout from damning stories. Exxon knew for decades that fossil fuels warm the planet; it’s enjoyed record profits in the decade-plus since that story broke.
For the relatively small numbers of us who know that history, what’s unnerving about MAHA’s blinkered anti-corporatism isn’t the movement’s hypocrisy—the fact that crusaders for public health with plenty of valid concerns are still willing to support politicians funded by polluters, and that have handed those donors ever-larger blank checks to pollute. Many of them, after all, oppose vaccination programs that have saved millions of lives. The real trouble is how extraordinarily difficult it has been to translate our arsenal of well-documented facts into accountability, lasting political majorities, and/or policies that both get at the root of the problem and can weather a change in administrations. There are no easy answers for how to confront industries making products that are deadly, ubiquitous, and at least somewhat profitable. MAHA certainly hasn’t figured it out. Democrats who want to try might start by appealing to something a bit more basic than well-trod lefty topics like corporate hypocrisy, or even money in politics: This stuff is making us sick, and that should stop.
