The second annual Make America Healthy Again (Maha) summit in Washington DC on Tuesday put JD Vance 2028 ambitions on show: the US vice-president, widely seen as the Republican frontrunner for the 2028 election, courted Robert F Kennedy Jr's movement – one that many in the Trump administration believe helped to win the 2024 election.

A frontrunner works the Maha room

Vance has positioned himself as the inheritor of Make America Great Again (Maga), and his public embrace of Maha signals growing overlap between the two movements – even as some describe Maha as shedding its grassroots supporters in favor of political and corporate interests.

• •With Kennedy, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and Maha's leader, Vance traded jokes about memes and the 'carnivore' diet of meat and fermented foods.
• •He said he and Kennedy trade memes with cabinet secretaries on a group text chain, staying ahead of social media.
• •He mocked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, described as his closest political rival, saying his poor poker face makes superb meme material, and cited one image of Marco in a blonde wig created after Dolly Parton died.

Art Caplan, professor emeritus at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said Vance was there emphasizing the politics Maha stirs up and calculating how to win over Maha devotees rather than lose them to Rubio:

Fraud claims with few receipts

Policy talk centered on Vance's self-described record as a fraud hunter. He highlighted his role in identifying what he says is fraud in Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act marketplace, blaming immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. He claimed his anti-fraud task force has found close to $250bn in fraud since he began leading it.

• •He claimed the states that administer the programs don't enforce them at all, and that undocumented people were receiving Medicare benefits – though no documentation shows this is happening.
• •Drawing applause, he told critics to stop and be honest that the dispute is about giving benefits to undocumented immigrants.
• •He appeared to suggest the health system needs stronger oversight, saying programs like Medicaid and Medicare are stronger when fraud can be detected, even though the administration has largely pursued deregulation.
• •The administration, for its part, has released scant details on who has been unenrolled from these programs and why the activity was judged fraudulent.

The grassroots wing pushes back

The gathering also laid bare the fracturing of the Maha movement. Maha has often been an uneasy alliance among environmental, nutrition and anti-vaccine activists, and political and corporate actors – and the event appeared to favor the latter over the former.

• •An AP-KFF survey found 68% of rural Maha supporters said Trump's health policies have had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live.
• •The survey highlights a disconnect between the Maha project and its base, especially in rural areas that overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2024 election.
• •Dr Mary Talley Bowden, who opposes Covid vaccines and was reprimanded for stealthily providing unproven Covid treatments, asked on X why grassroots voices were being excluded.
• •Kelly Ryerson, also known as the Glyphosate Girl, said the speaker lineup ignored the issues that birthed the original Maha movement and drove voters, especially women, to the coalition, adding that some speakers had no connection to Maha's original agenda.
• •Robert Malone, a conspiracy theorist who voted to restrict vaccines as a member of the now-halted vaccines advisory committee, wrote on his Substack that Maha has been captured by the corporate interests it set out to fight, decrying its self-dealing character.

Corporate money and AI praise

The money behind the event drew sharp scrutiny. The summit featured companies including UnitedHealth, Walmart and Anthropic, some with active business before the US government, and Grail, an experimental cancer-treatment company whose approval is currently before the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was a top sponsor. According to Bloomberg reporting, companies that paid $300,000 were given the option of speaker slots, as well as a private dinner with Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz.

• •The Maha Center, which organized the event, is one of several Maha-affiliated ventures run by Tony Lyons, a longtime vaccine critic who has paid Kennedy $4m in the past year.
• •Tickets were sold to 'Maha members' paying $6,000 a year to Maha Holdings, whose sole board member is Finn Kennedy, Kennedy's 29-year-old son.
• •Speakers included Oz; Brooke Rollins, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture; and Stefanie Spear, a top Kennedy aide.

Caplan called the summit a giant conflict of interest, saying the event seemed designed to let paying actors reach senior Trump administration officials and describing it as ethically disturbing and resembling pay to play. "Normally, you don't get a chance to cozy up to FDA officials. That's troubling."

Kennedy, who has long attacked corporate influence over Americans' health, said little about corporate power at the event and instead praised companies like OpenAI, which has millions of dollars in US government contracts. Quoting OpenAI's Sam Altman, he told the summit that doctors today would be negligent not to consult AI when diagnosing or prescribing, and said large language models can give a second opinion much better informed than any doctor in the country.

About a third of Americans – 32% – consult AI for medical information and advice, though AI chatbots are inaccurate about 25% of the time. Kennedy, for his part, declared that Americans will never again submit to public officials who tell them to trust the experts.

The fractures were on full display, but Caplan's verdict on what the courtship was worth pointed past them: Maha could still be a powerful asset for Vance even if the movement splits, provided he wins over even half of the support Trump received in 2024.