Policy Shift or Strategic Omission? Trump Radio Silent on MAHA in State of the Union Address

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Originally posted by: Children's Health Defense

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address — which was big on the economy, but not on health-related issues — drew mixed reactions from the health and medical freedom communities.

Trump’s speech Tuesday night was the longest such address in U.S. history, clocking in at 1 hour and 47 minutes. The address included no mention of the chronic disease epidemic, children’s health, vaccines, autism or food safety.

Trump didn’t mention U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or the administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. But according to Emily G. Hilliard, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Trump and Kennedy’s priorities remain aligned.

“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy remain aligned in their shared goal to Make America Healthy Again and combat the chronic disease epidemic,” Hilliard said in a statement to The Defender.

Some health and medical freedom advocates said Trump’s failure to mention MAHA may signal a shift away from the initiative’s agenda to address chronic disease. Others suggested the omission was strategic, given this year’s crucial midterm elections.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland said there were several positive takeaways from Trump’s address.

“While President Trump did not put the MAHA theme front and center, he did not abandon it either. He focused on the economy, as is typical of presidents facing tough midterm elections,” Holland said.

Indeed, some of Trump’s references to health-related topics were contextualized in economic terms. In one instance, Trump stated that he is “confronting one of the biggest rip-offs of our times: the crushing costs of health care.”

“From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive and hard-working people who make our country great, who make our country run,” Trump said.

Trump took the opportunity to attack Obamacare and promote TrumpRx, his administration’s new prescription drug marketplace, launched earlier this month. He said that through TrumpRx, he is “ending the wildly inflated costs of prescription drugs.” He accused Obamacare of benefiting major insurance companies.

“Big insurance companies have gotten rich. It was meant for the insurance companies,” Trump said.

Trump’s address ‘an early draft of his midterm message’

Trump briefly addressed several other health-related topics, including the nationwide fentanyl epidemic. He cited statistics indicating that the flow of fentanyl across the U.S. border “is down by a record 56%, in one year.”

“That’s why I designated these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and I declared illicit fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction,” Trump said.

Trump also addressed parental rights in medical decision-making in the context of gender-affirming care. He cited the example of Sage Blair, who in 2021, at age 14, almost underwent gender transition with the help of officials at her Virginia school — and without her parents’ knowledge.

Blair ultimately ran away from home. She ended up being taken to an all-boys institution, where she “suffered terribly for a long time.” Today, she is “a proud and wonderful young woman with a full-ride scholarship to Liberty University,” Trump said.

Trump, who last year signed an executive order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” called for legislation banning children’s gender transition against their parents’ will.

“We can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’re even talking about that? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” Trump said.

Trump also briefly addressed Big Tech, announcing a policy requiring artificial intelligence (AI) data centers to generate their own electricity, suggesting that this would help lower energy prices for consumers.

“They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up, and in many cases prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down. This is a unique strategy never used in this country before,” Trump said.

Holland said that Trump’s “embrace of parental rights and religious freedom aligns with CHD’s work to ensure parental rights for children’s health and religious upbringing, especially as it touches on the right to refuse medical coercion on religious grounds,” Holland said.

Vermont attorney and farmer John Klar suggested Trump’s omission of MAHA during his address doesn’t mean the initiative has lost White House support.

“I didn’t take umbrage at his failure to address the MAHA movement — Trump did discuss fentanyl deaths, lowering prescription prices and bringing down healthcare costs. But MAHA is not really the president’s territory — it’s Kennedy’s. And on that front, the president continues to fully support RFK Jr.’s initiatives,” Klar said.

Internal medicine physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker said Trump’s address “was an early draft of his midterm message, designed to encourage voters to support the Republicans in the midterms in the simplest and most glowing terms possible, which is understandable politically.”

MAHA wins ‘glaringly omitted’ from Trump’s speech

Despite an apparent strategic emphasis on the part of Trump and his advisers to focus on the economy, Baker said the speech “ignored multiple of the administration’s recent policies which have been very unpopular with his base.”

Baker said:

“With the exception of his efforts to lower prescription drug prices, the realm of healthcare and certainly the priorities of MAHA were almost completely absent in the speech. The disastrous executive order regarding glyphosate was completely ignored, for example.

“There is concern that the President is ignoring or reversing course on multiple ‘80-20’ type issues that ordinary voters care deeply about, including vaccines, medical freedom, pesticides and MAHA in general. One worries about who is advising him on controversial topics.”

Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and the Moms Across America Movement, agreed. “Health is the foundation of all other successes. The wins of MAHA were glaringly omitted in the State of the Union, a missed opportunity to celebrate the greatest movement this country has ever seen,” she said.

For Klar, the omission of any mention of vaccines during Trump’s speech was one of several examples where the president avoided addressing controversial issues.

“Vaccines remain controversial, so I didn’t expect him to highlight that issue,” Klar said. “Similarly, he largely avoided immigration issues, despite immigration being a central policy focus.”

Klar suggested that Trump’s advisers likely judged that some other issues, such as changes to nutritional guidelines, wouldn’t resonate strongly during such a speech.

“I’m not sure improving the food pyramid would resonate powerfully as part of a State of the Union address, but it is just one step among others to improve food supplies and reverse the nation’s chronic disease crisis,” Klar said.

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Democratic rebuttals also largely bypassed health-related topics

The Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, also largely bypassed health-related topics.

Spanberger accused Trump’s economic policies of making healthcare less affordable for Americans. “Costs are too high, in housing, healthcare, energy and childcare,” Spanberger said.

In addition to their official rebuttal, some Democrats organized other counter-events.

Dr. Jenna Norton, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) employee who was placed on administrative leave last year, allegedly for questioning staffing and funding cuts at the agency, delivered “The People’s State of the Union” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“The Trump administration put research participants and public health at risk when they abruptly terminated NIH studies,” Norton said. “By halting these studies, they also wasted taxpayer resources. When you halt a $5 million study four years in, you don’t save a million dollars, you waste $4 million.”

During the same event, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said “millions of Americans are losing their health care” due to the Trump administration’s policies.

Honeycutt called for a bipartisan effort to achieve MAHA objectives.

“Rather than a speech, insults thrown in both directions, and refusals to acknowledge each other, I would rather see our elected officials sit down, break bread and talk to each other about how to Make America Healthy Again,” she said.

Watch President Trump’s State of the Union address here: