An hilarious new US campaign ad, styled as a drug ad complete with symptoms, side-effects, testimonials and a gravely concerned voice-over, treats TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – as a genuine disease. The remedy is ‘Independence’, but the narrator intones ‘Independence may not be right for you. Ask your doctor’. The ad went viral, hitting five million views in its first week, and exciting much comment.

It was the witty work of the effective Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s running mate and lawyer, a reformed Democrat and committed health advocate coming to prominence after the recent union of the Trump campaign with RFK Jnr’s push. Her latest follow-up ad plays powerfully on the JFK and RFK assassinations, and urges ‘Finish the Story, Bobby’. It brought a tear to this old Boomer’s eye and rocketed to over 3 million views on its first day.

Unexpected synergies are emerging from the freshly combined energies of MAGA, and the newly created MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. Shanahan herself says that Democrats throttled and sabotaged the RFK Jnr campaign, and she’s enjoying the bigger platform and audience that the Trump campaign is giving their issues, appearing widely in all forms of media. If X is anything to go by, the MAGA crowd is loving Shanahan and her health views right back.

More to the point, a potent sleeper issue is now emerging in the race to the White House, and that issue is health, specifically children’s health. Few issues have the power to move mothers’ votes like their sick kids.

The voting gender gap is an area of notorious weakness for Trump, whose womanising and old-style masculine braggadocio turns off the misses of the #MeToo era. A CBS News poll in mid-August found that 54 per cent of men broke for Trump but only 44 per cent of women. Young women are a demographic that Trump needs, and he is promoting MAHA and RFK Jnr vigorously; Kennedy is spoken of as Trump’s likely health czar.

One small recent poll shows Kennedy voters breaking two-for-one for Trump, but many of Kennedy’s old hippies and alternative lifestylers will never contemplate voting Trump. However, RFK Jnr’s endorsement of Trump will provide cover for some, especially women, to change their vote, as the only way to improve a society ruined with processed, sugary foods and jabbed to near-infinity by a Centers for Disease Control which recommends more than 70 vaccinations by the time children reach 18.

Shanahan herself, billionaire ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, tags her X account Healthy Planet and Healthy Humans. She has skin in the game, with an autistic child. The whole thrust of RFK Jnr’s campaign, and his life’s work, is to clean up America’s corrupted and toxic food, farming and institutional systems; few have been more personally affected by US evils than he has, and his corporate knowledge is second to none.

While RFK Jnr’s family has virtually disowned him, he has the runs on the board as an environmental litigator of note and success, and chairs the Children’s Health Defense, which has long attacked issues such as fluoridation in water, dangerous chemicals, excessive vaccinations and the US’s highly processed and adulterated food supply, heavy with sugars, seed oils and chemicals of unknown combined effect.

It is too early to tell if this will move the election needle, with no clear signal yet in the polling of any RFK Jnr boost for Trump. However, there are promising signs of traction on social media for the MAHA message. This crystallised for me when I heard young conservative podcaster Alex Clark, whose audience is aged 25 to 35, report that leftist influencer mums are contacting her to say they will hold their noses and vote for Trump for the sake of their children’s health.

Politically, health campaigning has all too often been expensive promises about benefits, more drugs and surgery, more hospitals and research, and cheaper medicines, but rarely has the underlying system itself been examined. It’s a sickness system, rather than a health creation system, and long overdue for a clean-up.

There’s clearly a crisis when the nation that spends by far the most on health care per capita globally achieves devastatingly bad, and worsening outcomes, well below that of similar developed countries. US life expectancy is far below that of comparable countries, falling to around 48th globally in recent figures, below Albania and Greece. Autism rates are now 1 in 36 children in the US, yet for US Boomer generations, RFK Jnr says it was 1 in 10,000. Around 40 per cent of US children have a chronic disease, and 60 per cent of adults. Some 40 per cent of Americans are obese, compared with 3 per cent of Japanese. Another 30 per cent are overweight.

America is sick, and one needs only arrive in a US airport to suddenly notice bulging uniforms and vanishing jawlines, amid a reported $1 billion-a-month avalanche of prescription drug ads, the US being one of only two countries in the world permitting them. Big Pharma is the biggest lobbyist in Washington, and the revolving door between US regulatory agencies and big corporations is notorious. In a startling recent example of regulatory capture, as reported on Daily Wire from FoIA-ed emails, EPA clean air boss Joe Goffman asked a chemical lobbyist what he needed to do on a particular issue. ‘Dance You Monkey, Dance’ came the contemptuous reply.

The danger of ultra-processed foods is at last being understood, with California lawmakers recently becoming the first to ban schools from serving foods with six artificial ingredients linked to low IQ, behavioural problems and cancer; RFK Jnr recently told Fox that almost 1,000 chemicals banned in EU foods are still widely used in US foods. Leftist media icon Bill Maher frequently attacks the pill-happy US medical system, and said ‘enabler’ doctors killed performers Matthew Perry, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Prince and Elvis.

If the Trump campaign can publicise the shocking truths of America’s illness epidemics via the addition of RFK Jnr’s truth bullets, then not only the US but countries downstream, such as Australia, will benefit, and our children most of all.