One of the recurring themes this election cycle is a sense of betrayal: There are a growing number of constituencies that backed Republicans two years ago, only to feel abandoned by Donald Trump and his party.

Farmers, for example, voted for the president by lopsided margins in the 2024 race, and many have been let down by an administration that’s repeatedly made matters worse for the agricultural industry. Latino voters also shifted to Republicans in large numbers two years ago, confident that Trump would focus his deportation agenda on violent criminals.

They now know better Similarly, many Muslim voters also took at enormous risk in 2024, moving toward a GOP nominee who championed a Muslim ban in his first term. Two years later, it’s a community that feels used betrayed by a party that has seized on Islamophobia as the foundation for its closing message in the midterm elections. But it’s also worth sparing a thought for those who believed Trump when he promised he was committed to “making America healthy again.”

An overwhelming body of evidence leaves little doubt that he didn’t mean a word of it. The New York Times reported on the findings of a devastating investigation: In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect. Some were among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants.

About 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one affected facility. The exemptions represent the biggest presidential intervention in enforcement of the Clean Air Act in the half-century since President Richard M. Nixon signed the bedrock environmental law.

And that is only one of the ways the Trump administration is dismantling a variety of federal environmental protections. The Times documented in great detail the degree to which the Republican administration has systematically dismantled public safeguards to champion the wishes of polluters and chemical manufacturers, in ways without precedent in American history I’m mindful that much of the “MAHA” movement’s base is comprised of activists who are focused almost entirely on opposition to vaccines. But to the extent there are others who are genuinely interested in making America healthy again and who have sincere concerns about the spread of cancer-causing pollution, the Republican White House has gone to stunning lengths to express total indifference to those issues, instead elevating chemical industry lobbyists to leadership roles inside Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

“Donald Trump and [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] keep treating MAHA activists like disposable political pawns and now wonder why many resent it,” Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse recently said in a statement“There’s not one MAHA promise Trump hasn’t been willing to break once the checks clear from his big chemical, food and tobacco donors. Food, air, water safety and kids’ health have all been compromised to feed profits for makers of addictive fruit flavored vapes, cancer-linked pesticides, and PFAS forever chemicals. And every time RFK Jr. proves himself a phony by making excuses for Trump’s latest MAHA double-cross, like making glyphosate great again.”

Time will tell how many of these constituencies move toward Democrats in the midterms or decide not to cast to ballots at all; but after the dust settles on the election cycle and the president and Republican leaders assess what went wrong, they might want to start by acknowledging the Americans who felt betrayed after counting on the GOP to deliver.

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