The Campaign To Divide MAGA & MAHA

Will the Trump White House or Big Pharma break up this new coalition first?

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The historic alliance between former Democrat presidential candidate (and MAHA icon) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump was one of the most unusual and important political events of the last decade. The alignment between MAHA (composed mostly of disaffected liberal voters) and MAGA (composed mostly of conservative Trump supporters) was the sort of coalition politics that many experts thought was impossible in a hyper-polarized America.

It turned out to be President Trump’s most consequential endorsement of the 2024 campaign.

This alignment was based upon a grand bargain: MAHA voters supported Trump on the condition that RFK Jr. would be elevated into a position inside the cabinet of the second Trump Administration from which he could implement the MAHA movement’s policy agenda — which included a complete halt to the wildly unpopular COVID vaccine policies that had started with Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” in 2020 and been institutionalized (and most would say, weaponized) by the Biden regime for four terrible years.

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The MAHA-MAGA alliance has a number of mortal enemies: Big Pharma being the most dangerous and well-financed. Will the pharmaceutical industry’s army of lobbyists manage to destroy the coalition? Will President Trump’s advisors be bribed into helping to undermine HHS Secretary Kennedy’s initiatives? Will Trump ultimately intervene to protect Kennedy and the MAHA-MAGA alliance?

These are crucial questions and — as everybody knows — natural immunity doesn’t have any lobbyists on K Street.

The opening few months of Kennedy’s reign at Health & Human Services looked promising. He replaced the entire ACIP committee — which was responsible for vaccine development approvals —and he removed the COVID vaccines from the recommendation schedule. Kennedy also signaled that he would release a report on the reasons behind the surge in autism in America later this year.

There have been a number of setbacks too. Kennedy originally appointed Dr. James Lyons-Weiler to run the transition at HHS. In the first months after the 2024 election, Weiler interviewed hundreds of Kennedy’s picks to staff key positions at agencies like HHS, CDC, FDA and NIH. This initial transition ended up still-born because all personnel picks were ultimately approved through the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

There are numerous examples of prominent MAHA figures who were offered jobs and then passed over without explanation during that time. Though Kennedy wanted to install Dr. Ryan Cole in a top position in one of his departments, that move was thwarted. Clearly, RFK Jr. does not have unilateral hiring authority in his own agency. Many of his staff picks seem to be compromises to political reality.

The first key battle that laid bare Kennedy’s difficult position — and the hidden war to divide the MAGA-MAHA coalition — happened in July with the surprise firing of Vinay Prasad, the Director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).

On July 10th, the FDA approved Moderna’s Spikevax mRNA COVID vaccine for “high-risk” children — without warning. Although this decision should never have been made, the FDA basically blindsided Kennedy’s team, and HHS failed to handle the ensuing communications disaster. (As I first reported, Kennedy was in Europe at the time of the announcement and had not been informed.) Of course, the MAHA movement was furious with the FDA approval, and with good reason. But what was lost in the uproar was that Vinay Prasad, the Director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, had actually made a courageous decision when he overruled the FDA regulators who recommended that all three COVID vaccines currently under an EUA be approved for all age groups.

This becomes clear when reading Prasad’s justification letter which was released — and widely ignored — as an explanation for his denying the approval for the vaccines. In that letter, Prasad made it clear that Moderna had not shown that COVID-19 vaccination reduces long COVID or transmission in any setting at any age. He also stated that Moderna had never shown a reduction in severe COVID-19, hospitalization, or ICU stays.

Prasad’s letter should have reassured the entire medical freedom movement. Instead, Prasad found himself the subject of smears and attacks from several directions at once. Both MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and Big Pharma media outlet Wall Street Journal published hit pieces on him in rapid succession. According to my sources, a phone call took place between Trump and Kennedy about Prasad — with Laura Loomer and Susie Wiles also on the call. Loomer and Wiles apparently advocated for Prasad’s dismissal over Kennedy’s objections. (Prasad was known to be a Bernie Sanders supporter at heart — but he wasn’t a lap dog for Big Pharma either.) It appears that President Trump overruled Secretary Kennedy in the end — and ordered Prasad to be removed.

The MAHA movement took this firing as a kind of warning shot: the promises made during the 2024 campaign might be broken by the Trump White House.

The second event arrived on August 5th when Kennedy released a video announcement that HHS was going to cancel at least 22 contracts for mRNA vaccines worth $500 million. This move struck at the heart of Big Pharma’s vaccine industry. Predictably, a slew of government-funded scientists and discredited “public health experts” appeared in corporate media outlets to condemn the funding cuts and foment a backlash against Kennedy.

This backlash should have been anticipated by Secretary Kennedy’s HHS — but no strategic communication plan had been put in place to defend him. There was no fact sheet circulated or media interviews scheduled to explain the funding cuts. Meanwhile, Kennedy himself had been sent by his staff to Anchorage (Alaska) to meet with Native American tribal leaders as part of his health tour.

Incredibly, Kennedy’s HHS was operating as if it didn’t employ two dozen people in its Public Affairs office — and, really, as if it didn’t need anyone to defend him.

The blame for most of these basic mistakes ultimately rests with Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear — according to several sources familiar with the internal problems at HHS. Spear is a widely disliked figure from Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and at least four reporters who covered that campaign admitted to me this month that Spear regularly failed to perform the normal duties of a campaign press secretary. Calls were ignored, comments were never provided, and press requests were frequently dismissed. Essentially, Kennedy chose an aide to handle the press who totally ignored the press.

Once Secretary Kennedy arrived at HHS, he installed Stefanie Spear as one of his deputies — with predictable results. Though she is well known as a gatekeeper who has guarded access to Kennedy for the last 15 years, Spear is generally considered to be a total failure in her new role at HHS. In fact, I was unable to locate a single person who had anything positive to say about her — a dozen sources who have interacted with her, in her various roles with Kennedy over the years, provided me with off-the-record comments that were uniformly caustic and disparaging.

Spear does not merely ignore the press in her new role at HHS — she also demands that everybody else at HHS must ignore the press too. This became clear in the aftermath of the BARDA vaccine funding cuts, when Spear personally removed a Kennedy advisor who had been recently hired to advocate for Secretary Kennedy with MAGA media outlets.

Gray Delany was picked as Kennedy’s “Director of MAHA Implementation” less than two months before Spear demanded his resignation. What was Delany’s mistake? Apparently, he participated on a MAHA Action call on August 6th with thousands of activists and asked them to support Secretary Kennedy’s funding cuts. Then Delany helped to book Dr. Hatfill on the well-known show, Steve Bannon’s War Room, on August 7th to defend the funding cuts as well.

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Less than an hour before his TV appearance, Dr. Hatfill was informed that Stefanie Spear would not provide her permission for him to appear on the show. Dr. Hatfill went ahead with the interview over Spear’s objection. He apparently told an aide, “She can f***ing fire my ass if she wants to. I am 71 years old and don’t need this shit. I will happily return to Florida.”

Hatfill’s appearance was a rousing success in terms of the MAHA agenda and Secretary Kennedy’s actions at HHS: “The vaccines have injured hundreds of thousands, and we’re not really sure how many have been killed by it, but a significant amount. They [mRNA vaccine technology] had to come off the market. There was no choice. You want to make America healthy again? It had to be stopped.”

Secretary Kennedy was reportedly thrilled with the interview. According to several sources, he called Dr. Hatfill to let him know that he had “hit a home run.” Meanwhile, Gray Delany was told that Stefanie Spear had lost confidence in him and was asked for his resignation.

Did Spear consult with the Trump White House or PPO before firing an advisor that she did not personally hire? Did Secretary Kennedy know that advisors who publicly defended his actions were being fired for doing so?

Was the rift between MAHA and MAGA going to get worse — or be restored?

One thing is certain: a crucial part of President Trump’s political coalition is watching closely.

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