How Donald Trump Created the Worst Diarrhea Outbreak This Century

https://prospect.org/2026/07/16/how-donald-trump-created-worst-diarrhea-outbreak-cyclosporiasis-food-safety/

The ‘MAHA Trots’ are what happens when Republicans implement their anti-government agenda.

Ryan Cooper
BY RYAN COOPER
JULY 16, 2026

A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.

So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots.

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Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure.
Now, it is difficult to prove with 100 percent confidence that this outbreak would not have happened under a Democratic president. One can’t demonstrate that one of the food safety experts fired by Musk, Russ Vought, or Kennedy would have discovered its source and thus squelched the outbreak by now, precisely because they weren’t on the job. But the circumstantial case is overwhelming.

On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure. As part of his initial wholesale attack on state capacity in February 2025, he dissolved the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was set up under President Reagan in 1988 to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for defending against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Wouldn’t you know it, just before being destroyed the committee was working on advice regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.