MAHA’s money man has built a political machine. Will it matter for midterms?

A sixth-generation farmer running for Iowa governor, Zach Lahn is the first MAHA-endorsed candidate of the 2026 election cycle.

Running on a platform that includes taking on “Big Agriculture” and “Big Pharma,” his visibility in a crowded field received a boost in publicity when he appeared in December on a popular weekly teleconference hosted by MAHA Action, a lobby group that has become the chief political arm of the movement.

Introducing Lahn, MAHA Action’s leader Tony Lyons declared: “This race is a national problem. It’s a national race, and it’s critical for the MAHA movement. And victory here will demonstrate that we can rebuild, you know, values that will make this country healthy.”

Over the first year of the Trump presidency, “Make America Healthy Again” advocates have issued a warning: Politicians ignore MAHA’s demands at their peril. The deep-pocketed financiers who fueled the movement’s rise have been building the machinery to take MAHA from grassroots outsiders to entrenched power players in Washington and around the country.

The most influential among these is Lyons, a long-time supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has poured millions into building the political movement, first as a backer of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential run, and now as one of the key architects of MAHA’s political influence.

“We need to fight, fight, fight, and we need to keep making progress,” Lyons, whose company Skyhorse has made a name publishing the works of controversial figures, including RFK Jr., said when he introduced Lah