Trump’s agriculture bailout alienates his MAHA base

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

“If anything, the EPA is in a much worse position in this administration than it was during the Biden administration,” she added. “And that’s something that really frustrates large numbers of voters who came with this promise.”

However, the coalition’s wrath appears to be aimed solely at Zeldin (who recently teased his upcoming agenda for MAHA). Ryerson has nothing but praise for other leaders in the administration, such as 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 an example of the administration’s commitment to cleaning up the nation’s food system.

At the same time, the administration’s support for factory farms, the major users of toxic pesticides, far exceeds its support for farms that practice more planet-friendly methods. Ryerson freely admits this. Farming has been “dominated by industrial agriculture, which we all know is a really inconvenient truth, but we all know it has destroyed our soil,” she said. However, she said the problem lies with the EPA.

“The MAHA movement,” Ryerson continued, “we would like to see a complete overhaul of our agricultural system that spends this ridiculously obscene amount of money subsidizing products that are not food for us at all.”

Yet Trump shows no signs of abandoning the billion-dollar farm bailout rules — supporting the pesticide sustainability regime that MAHA is rallying against.