When interviewed on stage at the Conservative Political Conference on Saturday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked a question unlikely to be on anyone’s mind amid the upheaval in the department he oversees and the conflict in the Middle East: “Who has more power—you or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth?”
The exchange was indicative of the role Kennedy and other HHS officials played during the four-day meeting. While some MAGA attendees grumbled about the war in Iran, they met many MAHAs. Kennedy followed Froot Loops and lamented how Americans don’t know how to cook anymore. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, warned about hospital fraud in California. And Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health and acting director (of sorts) of the CDC, explained the value of buying back drugs that are already approved for new diseases. “This sounds silly,” he told the crowd, “but it’s very important.”
Perhaps the administration thought that the focus on health would distract from what’s going on in Iran—a sore point for Republicans who want President Trump to focus on domestic issues. Kennedy said, without being forced, that he believed his anti-war uncle and father would approve of military action. But he was also the most prominent member of the Trump administration to take action at CPAC. In particular, there was no one named Trump or any official involved in the decision to attack Iran.
If that was the administration’s strategy, it didn’t seem to be working among the world’s biggest MAGA opponents to Trump’s latest military action. Although a poll of this year’s CPAC attendees found that 89 percent approve of the administration’s actions in Iran, others I spoke with were concerned about the state of “eternal war” in the Middle East. As Madeline Elizabeth, a Republican strategist who attended CPAC, told me, “I think the MAHA movement is about the only thing that is ‘America First’ about this administration.”
As he has done in his other recent appearances, Kennedy stuck to his talking points. He proposed what he considers to be his triumph at HHS—specifically, the the inversion of the food pyramid emphasizing protein consumption—and insisting that the president was “on my side on almost every issue” when Kennedy decided to endorse Trump in 2024. But Kennedy did not mention his CDC renewal. vaccine advisory committee or change of recommended childhood immunization schedulewhich are easily among the most important policies of his first year in power. Maybe he avoided doing it because, like Washington Post reported, the White House has instructed him to stop taking action on vaccines for fear of Republicans losing the midterms. (HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told me, “We remain focused on the priorities Americans repeatedly say are important to them, including tackling chronic disease, improving nutrition and food quality, and reducing the cost of health care and prescription drugs.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
The closest Kennedy came to any vaccine talk was when he mentioned that, growing up, he didn’t know any children with autism—a seemingly veiled reference to his long-held belief that vaccines have contributed to the rise in autism since the 1990s. That increase, experts say, is largely due to better monitoring and broader diagnostic criteria. When Bhattacharya he did talk about vaccines—lauding the shingles shot and mocking research on whether it can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease—the crowd was unmoved. Bhattacharya’s only cheer came when he said, “It’s no longer Tony Fauci’s NIH.”
Many of the CPAC attendees I spoke to told me they liked Kennedy. Usually with these words: I love him. They weren’t always sure about the specifics of his agenda, but they liked that he was focused on being healthy. A CPAC attendee named Michael Smith, who was advocating for the Ten Commandments to be sent to public schools and who dressed like Moses—with a staff and a bushy beard—told me that Kennedy was “taking us back to the meal in the Garden of Eden.” Several people, including a woman who says she lost 50 pounds just eating meat, told me their personal health stories. (Kennedy recently admitted that he eats a carnivore diet.) It seemed that everyone had read Kennedy’s best seller, The Real Anthony Fauciand many volunteered to me that they had not received the COVID vaccine.
Kennedy’s ritual created an unusual sense of tension in the meeting. It is true that some GOP strategists have claimed that the MAHA coalition is the basis for Republicans to win the midterms later this year. For the most part, they’re talking about health-conscious voters who can be swayed to support Republican candidates. Perhaps it’s no surprise that, at CPAC, fans are MAGA first and MAHA as a bonus.
But at the same time, the credibility of MAGA is replacing the hype of MAHA. How amazing it was no one it seemed to be there only, or even primarily, to support MAHA. At one point during Kennedy’s fiery speech, the interviewer, Mercedes Schlapp, asked the audience if they were “mothers of MAHA.” In a crowd of several hundred, perhaps several hands shot. Scanning the crowd, I noticed no shortage of Trump-themed clothing, but no one wore MAHA T-shirts or hats. Talking about MAHA’s priorities “isn’t electrifying anybody, and quite honestly, it’s not a conversation, like, broadly, that’s being talked about,” Vish Burra, a Republican strategist and MAGA lobbyist, told me. (Last spring, Burra was fired from his job as a producer for the One America News Network after he posted an anti-Semitic AI-generated video on his personal X account. He later deleted the post.)
Kennedy, who recently had surgery for a rotator-cuff injury, ended up telling Schlapp that Hegseth might have the edge in the strength test: “He’s given me a couple of pounds.” But even if Hegseth can bench more than the HHS secretary, at the country’s most prominent conservative conference, Kennedy is the one the Trump administration seems tasked with lifting up its disillusioned fans.
