Populist Science and the Discursive Politics of “Make America Healthy Again”

In the United States, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has captured public attention. While MAHA espouses some positions supported by peer-reviewed research (e.g., ultraprocessed foods are harmful to health) it simultaneously promotes scientifically dubious claims (e.g., vaccines are dangerous). How can social scientists make sense of these incongruent positions surrounding public health, science, and risk? To answer this question, this paper systematically examines the discursive politics of MAHA’s political arm by analyzing official government communications published during the first year of the second Trump administration. It finds that key MAHA actors root their claims in a “populist science” that speaks the language of science while claiming to disembed knowledge systems from corrupt institutions that harm ordinary people. By constructing a dichotomy between “good” and “captured” science MAHA rhetorically consolidates control over what counts as legitimate expertise. MAHA’s political discourse strategically ignores peer-reviewed evidence linking chronic disease to social inequality, racism, and economic disparities, revealing MAHA’s alignment with nationalist, anti-regulatory politics. Rather than democratize risk governance, MAHA substitutes one set of institutional authorities for another. The paper demonstrates how science populism functions as a governance strategy that reconfigures the boundaries of legitimate expertise to align with nationalist and anti-regulatory politics.