Turns out Trump and RFK Jr.’s obsession with whole milk has nothing to do with health and everything to do with money

The second administration of Donald Trump has a weird fixation on whole milk, and both he and Secretary of Health RFK Jr. have spent months campaigning for the return of full-fat dairy to schools and people’s morning cereal routine.

But spoiler alert: this isn’t about your kid’s calcium intake. Heck, it’s not even about nutrition at all. (The alleged health benefits remain murky, at best.) As it turns out, this is the dairy industry finally cashing in on a decade-long lobbying campaign to reverse what Obama did to them during his tenure with the pesky ban on fatty foods.

Last Wednesday, President Trump signed the “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” in one of the strangest Oval Office ceremonies in recent memory. The POTUS was surrounded by dairy farmers and his favorite raw milk evangelist RFK Jr., but also present in the room was a five-day-old bottle of milk. Trump was rambling on about how “everybody shared a bottle” back in the good old days before offering reports a sip of said bottle.

Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I would be writing any of these words in this particular order, and yet somehow this isn’t even the weirdest thing that has happened this week in the Looney Tunes episode that Trump calls an administration.

But here’s where it gets interesting, folks. You may have been rightly wondering why Trump and this administration is so hell-bent on making whole milk a thing again, and the answer lies not in any health explanations they may offer you — and there are none — but in the dairy industry that has been salivating over this moment since 2012. According to a report by OpenSecrets, the industry has spent over $6 million annually on lobbying since 2011.

Now, you may ask: Why the hell would the dairy industry spend that kind of money in Washington? Well, most people don’t know this but dairy is a huge cash cow (Sorry, had to) in the United States. According to The Atlantic, “only last year, dairy products in the U.S. had an economic impact of nearly $780 billion.” That’s not a number to scoff at, and it certainly doesn’t help that the consumption of milk in children has declined because low-fat milk doesn’t taste nearly as good as the full-fat stuff your grandparents grew up on.

Gregg Doud, CEO of National Milk Producers Federation, celebrated this new directive by Trump and said that he’s glad the “persistent- long-term effort” has finally paid off in Congress. Michael Dykes, CEO of International Dairy Foods Association, was even more explicit in his victory lap: “The long wait is over! Today’s House passage marks a defining victory for children’s health and for dairy community that has fought for more than a decade to restore whole and 2% milk for our nation’s students.”

Translation? We finally got what we paid for. Do you notice that it’s the “dairy community” that fought to get this approved? Not parents, not nutritionists, and certainly not pediatricians. The dairy community. The same folks who stand to profit directly from millions of schoolchildren consuming their products daily.

You only think you know the depths Donald Trump and his administration are willing to go to line the pockets of their rich friends and the elite. And then they literally put dairy farmers in the Oval Office while signing a bill worth $780 billion to help the so-called Big Dairy.

Indeed, as it turns out, there’s always room for one more grift.