How a MAHA leader turned and torched the White House
White House spokesperson Allison Schuster said in a statement the Trump administration has won "extensive victories for the MAHA Agenda." The Department of Health and Human Services and a Wiles spokesperson didn't respond to requests for comment.
Key points
- It also raises questions about what the escalating fight between Means and former White House officials will accomplish for the movement.
- Bush's White House and at the Heritage Foundation before going on to work as a consultant to beverage and drug industries.
- The big picture: After hitching their wagon to President Trump ahead of the 2024 election, MAHA leaders have been complaining for months of a lack of progress on issues around healthy foods and pesticide use.
Calley Means quickly rose from wellness entrepreneur to senior Trump health adviser — and now he's attacking the White House and suggesting top aides undermined the president's health agenda.
Additional details
- Why it matters: His scorched-earth campaign — which continued Monday in comments to Axios — marks a stunning turn for a figure who was the administration's most vocal advocate of the "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
- He told Axios in 2024 that his mother's preventable death from a chronic disease in 2021 prompted him and his sister, "functional medicine" physician and health influencer Casey Means, to advocate and work to reverse the chronic disease crisis.
- The siblings wrote a best-selling book called "Good Energy." Calley Means also co-founded Truemed, a company that helps people buy wellness equipment using money in health savings accounts, retaining an interest while advising Kennedy, per the New York Times.
- He made frequent, at times flamboyant appearances in public forums, railing against a "crisis of trust" in health care institutions and claiming at one 2025 Axios event that Kennedy "has a spiritual mandate" from voters to reform broken….
- Means is widely credited with facilitating the alliance between Kennedy and President Trump in the summer of 2024 and became a special government employee in the new Trump administration.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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