Helena Bottemiller Evich

If you dive a little bit more into what he said publicly recently, he said that he believes the US needs to transition away from using glyphosate, but we have to do so slowly.

I think one of the key questions here for me as a policy reporter is

is like whether or not the Trump administration is actually going to come up with a plan to do that.

That would still be a very controversial idea.

And I've seen no evidence that we are actually moving in that direction.

So it remains a really key point of tension within the Maha movement and within the Trump administration.

I think it's all ripping open right now because of this executive order and also the tremendous litigation pressure that Bayer is under.

There's also a case that is going before the Supreme Court in April, basically trying to decide whether or not EPA should have the final say on the safety of glyphosate and whether we should have federal preemption or whether a lot of the liability that Bayer has faced will stand.

So basically they're trying to stem the tide of these lawsuits.

So far, the Trump administration has been on the side of Bayer and Maha advocates are actually now planning a rally outside of the Supreme Court the day that the first oral arguments are being heard.

And so this is going to continue to be a very big conflict that's going to happen publicly.

Within the Trump administration, we've seen most of their MAHA wins and most of the MAHA rhetoric so far going after the food industry.

So they're talking about, you know, trying to phase out artificial dyes.

They're trying to get more states to ban soda from SNAP.

They are focused a lot on the rhetoric against the food industry.

But the agriculture side, the politics are much trickier.

And so I think we are going to continue to see this as a point of conflict.

And this matters a lot because we're facing down the midterms.

And Republicans want to keep this Maha voting bloc as part of their coalition going into the midterms.

I really don't know where all of this is headed, but I think the big central question at the heart of all of this is whether a deregulatory sort of traditional Republican stance can square with what the Maha movement is.