The Man Holding MAHA Together

Tony Lyons knows how Republicans can win the midterm elections later this year. All they need to do, as he explained in a memo to GOP leaders in February, is embrace the Make America Healthy Again movement, or at least the popular parts of it, like banning soda from SNAP benefits and ditching artificial food dyes. Divisive anti-vaccine issues, in contrast, must be “addressed carefully and with nuance.” Follow this plan, insists Lyons—who is president of MAHA Action, a nonprofit that promotes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda—and the “MAHA Winnable Middle” will be yours.

Getting Republicans on board with MAHA is Lyons’s primary mission. Also important: making sure the movement doesn’t implode in the meantime.

In recent weeks, MAHA diehards have been fuming, particularly after Donald Trump signed an executive order shielding manufacturers of the widely used weed killer glyphosate from liability. Some studies suggest that glyphosate exposure leads to cancer, and MAHA activists want it banned. More recent setbacks for Kennedy—such as Casey Means’s stalled bid for surgeon general and a federal judge’s preliminary injunction against changes to the childhood vaccine schedule—haven’t exactly helped. Lyons has counseled frustrated supporters to “stay together and stay focused.” Several influential MAHA figures have told me, however, that if the Trump administration shrugs off their priorities, they see no reason to remain loyal.

With the exception of Kennedy himself, no one is more central to MAHA as a political project than Lyons. He is the movement’s chief strategist, primary spokesperson, and—as of late anyway—most ardent apologist. Along with heading MAHA Action, he is a co-president of MAHA PAC, the political arm of the movement, which aims to help elect GOP candidates who support MAHA causes to the Senate and House. Lyons told me he plans to back as many as 20 Republicans in the midterms; recently, MAHA PAC gave $1 million to Julia Letlow, the Louisiana congresswoman running in the Republican primary against Senator Bill Cassidy, a frequent Kennedy critic. Lyons is also the president of MAHA Center, the nonprofit responsible for the former boxer and current Trump supporter Mike Tyson’s apple-chomping Super Bowl commercial. Whereas MAHA PAC’s stated goal is to elect Republicans, MAHA Center is at least officially nonpartisan.

In contrast with the wellness influencers in the MAHA movement, Lyons is unlikely to be caught promoting a supplement stack or posting shirtless cold-plunge videos. Instead he’s the suit with the salt-and-pepper beard in charge of making it all sound reasonable. I met Lyons last fall in Austin at the annual conference for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded in 2018, where he told me that the movement had been unfairly maligned as unscientific and irresponsible. We’ve since exchanged texts and spoken on the phone a number of times—usually late in the evening. “I feel like I could work around the clock and that I get more and more energy because I believe that I’m doing something that’s important,” he told me during one such exchange. Lyons considers Kennedy both a folk hero and a friend.

[Read: The meme-washing of RFK Jr.]

Lyons’s day job—and the way he first got involved in Kennedy’s world—is running Skyhorse Publishing. Lyons founded the independent press in 2006 and carved out a lucrative niche with books about fishing and sports along with occasional forays into politics, including former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s best seller American Conspiracies, which asserts that officials in George W. Bush’s administration were complicit in the 9/11 attacks, among other wild and unsupported claims. Over time, Skyhorse became known for acquiring titles by scandal-tainted authors, including Woody Allen and the Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey, after they’d been dumped by major publishing houses.

Lately Skyhorse has become the publisher of choice for MAHA-aligned writers—so much so that it now has a MAHA imprint. In 2014, Skyhorse published Thimerosal: Let The Science Speak. The book, edited by Kennedy, makes the case that the mercury-derived vaccine preservative is dangerous and could be to blame for the rise in autism rates since the 1990s. (Thimerosal was removed from routine childhood vaccines in the United States such as DTaP, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, in 2001; no credible evidence has linked the compound to autism.) The book was widely panned, including by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which cited its “misrepresentations of facts and slippery slope distortions of research.” But those reviewers, Lyons said, “were making the argument that Bobby Kennedy was dangerous” not because Kennedy’s views ran counter to experts in the field—though they certainly did—but because he was a threat to pharmaceutical companies’ profits. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn’t accept corporate or government funding.)

Skyhorse has since published a dozen or so books by Kennedy, including a memoir and several more anti-vaccine treatises. The most successful of those books, by far, is The Real Anthony Fauci, a nearly 500-page diatribe against the now-retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that suggests that drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are effective treatments for COVID (they are not) and entertains doubts about whether HIV causes AIDS (it does). Since Kennedy took office, Skyhorse has also published books by his allies and family. Among them is a memoir by Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, and a satirical book about Fauci by Robert Kennedy III. According to Skyhorse’s website, a children’s book titled Making America Healthy Again, due in August and written by the author of another book titled I’m Unvaccinated and That’s OK!, touts the “exciting progress” being made by MAHA, which includes “updating the childhood vaccine schedule to prioritize safer, evidence-based options.” (Last month, a judge temporarily blocked changes made to the childhood vaccine schedule in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. When I asked Lyons whether the book would be updated, he demurred.)

[Read: A new level of vaccine purgatory]

Before Kennedy was confirmed last year, he disclosed that he will receive advances of $2 million to $4 million from Skyhorse for three upcoming books. According to Lyons, the health secretary has been working on a new book, though it’s not listed on Skyhorse’s website. Lyons wouldn’t reveal the title or when it would be available, though he did confirm that the book would include an account of a supposed CDC cover-up of vaccine harms. For years, Kennedy has accused the CDC of practicing politicized science, and during his confirmation hearing, he said it might be the most corrupt agency in the federal government. Hundreds of people will be involved in researching and fact-checking the book, Lyons told me. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

Skyhorse authors are frequent guests on the MAHA Action Media Hub, a livestreamed show that Lyons hosts every Wednesday afternoon. When Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared on the show in December to question the necessity of the hepatitis-B birth dose, a split screen showed the cover of his 2023 Skyhorse book, Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up. Russell Brand, the British comedian who has become MAHA’s court jester—and who in his home country faces charges of rape, which he has denied—usually appears toward the end of the show to proclaim his unabashed admiration for Kennedy, sometimes while driving in his car and once while naked in the bathtub. (Brand’s book How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is forthcoming from Skyhorse in May.) Another regular is Robert Malone, who has written a couple of conspiracy-themed books for Skyhorse denouncing the news media and the government, which he accuses of wielding “reality-bending information-control capabilities.” Kennedy named Malone to the CDC’s vaccine-advisory panel last year, but he recently quit in a huff, complaining that the Trump administration now considers debate over vaccines a “losing issue” in the midterms. In fact, the fate of Kennedy’s entire handpicked panel is in legal limbo, and the health secretary has apparently stopped speaking publicly about vaccines altogether, reportedly at the White House’s insistence.

[Read: RFK Jr. is losing his grip on the CDC]

I asked Lyons what he thought of reports that Kennedy has been reined in, and that Trump advisers worry that MAHA, far from being the key to victory in the midterms, has become a distraction or even a liability. Lyons wasn’t having any of it. He denied that he’s personally been instructed by the White House, or Kennedy, to stop talking about vaccines: “Nobody’s telling me what to do.” The reason the movement seems to be in turmoil now, he said, is that corporate interests and “corrupt deep-state allies” are trying to convince the left that MAHA has gone too far, and the right that it hasn’t gone far enough. “Who has been looking at the hidden ingredients in our food that are making us sick?” he said. “MAHA comes along, starts telling you what these things are, and then we have every major newspaper in the country saying that we’re anti-science, and that everything’s settled, everything’s perfect the way it is.”

Everything’s not perfect the way it is. The majority of American adults have at least one chronic disease, such as hypertension or diabetes. Most of us consume too much sugar and don’t get enough exercise. Some of MAHA’s priorities—like encouraging Americans to eat less junk food and be more physically active—should be uncontroversial. At the same time, MAHA rhetoric has also undermined confidence in childhood vaccines as measles outbreaks in under-vaccinated communities threaten the country’s elimination status.

Lyons, like Kennedy and other anti-vaccine advocates, rejects the idea that MAHA is anti-vaccine, instead casting it as an effort to challenge taboos and champion medical freedom. “The success is that people are starting to see through the idea that somehow vaccines are magic,” he told me. The issue is personal for Lyons: His adult daughter, Lina, has severe autism, and he has described her as vaccine-injured. Lina communicates using a method in which a nonspeaking person spells out words with the assistance of a facilitator, often a family member. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, along with other medical organizations, considers the technique scientifically discredited. But at a MAHA event in January, Lyons told the audience that, thanks to facilitated communication, “what we’re seeing now is that these children’s brains are intact.” Lina is writing a book using the technique; Lyons told me it will likely be published this summer.

It’s easy to imagine how the media and political infrastructure Lyons has helped create could serve as a springboard for a presidential campaign. In February, MAHA Action hosted Kennedy at an “Eat Real Food” event in Austin featuring Steak ’n Shake burgers and fries (cooked, naturally, in beef tallow) along with complimentary copies of The MAHA Cookbook (published, naturally, by Skyhorse). I was there, and it felt, at times, like a campaign rally, albeit one with posters of whole milk and ribeyes. Nevertheless, Lyons insists that the odds of Kennedy running for president are one in a million. “He is not really trying to get more power,” Lyons told me.

[Read: MAHA has been given an impossible task]

Whether Kennedy can hold on to the power he already has may depend on whether Lyons can somehow appease Kennedy’s restless supporters—all while convincing Republicans that, when it comes to their chances next November, MAHA actually matters.