The Trump Administration Casts Out the ‘Soul’ of MAHA

As of today, it seems likely that the nation’s next surgeon general will, at least, have an active medical license. President Trump announced that he was pulling his nomination for Casey Means, a wellness influencer who dropped out of her surgical residency in 2018, in a Truth Social post this afternoon. The move is the latest setback for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which has embraced Means’s criticism of the medical establishment along with her fondness for raw milk and psychedelics. Her book, Good Energy, might as well be MAHA’s bible. Vani Hari, an activist and influencer better known as the Food Babe, told me recently that if Means wasn’t confirmed, it would “ruin the soul of MAHA.”Earlier this month, the White House seemed to still believe that Means could be confirmed. The president invited her to a roundtable for several MAHA influencers. (Among them was Kelly Ryerson, who told me that the group made clear to administration officials that Means’s troubled nomination was killing the mood of MAHA activists.) But when I spoke with Means this afternoon, shortly after Trump’s announcement, she told me that it had become obvious, over