MAHA influencer: Trump's executive order on glyphosate was a “slap in the face to MAHA” that “might cost the midterms for the Republican Party”
Kelly Ryerson: “This was an enormous political misstep”
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From the April 28, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends First
TODD PIRO (HOST): Here's where it gets tricky politically, you have RFK Jr. in the president's cabinet telling the president he was unhappy with the president's executive order that increased glyphosate production, basically telling everybody 'this does cause cancer.' His words, he literally said that. The president said it is important, on the other hand, to make sure that we are producing chemicals here in the United States, and that's why he ramped up production. You met with him, you brought other MAHA members in there. What did you tell him? Because again, this is pretty politically complex.
KELLY RYERSON (GUEST): It's very politically complex, and this is the issue that our entire agricultural system is really a fragile house of cards at this point because it is so extremely dependent on foreign inputs. Both fertilizers, which you can see right now during the war, farmers are struggling, fertilizer prices are up. They are also dependent on Roundup ready crops which require heavy levels of pesticides. We don't manufacture most of those pesticides, in fact the government in China, ChemChina, is a major manufacturer. They actually don't need to attack the United States because they already own us by virtue of the fact that we can't grow a lot of food now without a lot of pesticides. So we need to get off of that and regenerate our soil. This was an enormous political misstep, in terms of what the administration did, to have a real slap in the face to MAHA. Glyphosate is a banner issue for MAHA. We're very concerned about the impact on the body. It's in the air, it's in the water, it's in our bodies, in semen, it's going down umbilical cords. This is a very important issue to MAHA. But you do have the economic factor as well, where we do need to be able to create our own products, so it was understandable that the reasoning behind it, what wasn't understandable was why it needed to be an executive order to shout it from the rooftops and potentially provide a liability shield also around Bayer and all manufacturing. That seemed unnecessary, and it absolutely lit a -- truthfully it might cost the midterms for the Republican Party.