Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, spoke exclusively to The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy about his new documentary, The MISSION: Make America Healthy Again, which exposes the systemic problems in America’s food and healthcare industries.
Cortes’ documentary, which debuted Monday morning, features interviews of doctors, farmers, nurses, administrators, and moms “uniting to make our people happier, physically stronger, and more vibrant” by “taking back power, and repelling the toxic practices of Big Food and Big Pharma,” according to its description on CortesInvestigates.com.
On Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Cortes explained that the short documentary is inspired by the health-focused agendas of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump, who are both advocating for a return to natural health and prevention-based medicine.
He said the documentary critiques “Big Food” for promoting ultra-processed, unhealthy products, and “Big Pharma” for prioritizing profit through the long-term management of chronic disease rather than prevention or cure.
“I am largely backing up and reinforcing and trying to persuade people on the agenda of RFK Jr. and President Trump to make Americans healthier again. And to do that, we’re exposing both Big Food, which largely poisons our bodies, and then Big Pharma, which rather than trying to primarily prevent disease or trying to cure disease, instead wants to manage chronic illness because that’s very profitable for them and a lot of people in the medical industry,” Cortes explained.
“But we can break free from all of that. We can consume far better, healthier foods for our bodies, and when we do get sick, which is inevitable, we can pursue treatments that will cure disease rather than managing it,” he added.
The documentary is set in Virginia, which Cortes said he chose both for its picturesque countryside and for its political relevance in the upcoming 2025 gubernatorial general election.
“There’s a lot of real experts and leaders in this field in Virginia, beautiful countryside, where I got to use that as a setting for filming, but also, this is obviously partly a political movement, and we hope that it motivates voters in Virginia for this election and into the midterms next year that we now on the populous right, effectively own this issue. We’ve earned the right to own this issue of making America healthier,” he said.
Noting how he speaks with a diverse group of individuals throughout the film who are actively working toward building a healthier society, Cortes highlighted the role of policy in incentivizing harmful agricultural and food production practices.
Cortes said that many government subsidies support ultra-processed foods, contributing to nationwide health problems like obesity, diabetes, and chronic illness.
“Big Ag has done enormous damage to [farm] communities, but even more importantly, to the health broadly of Americans. A lot of foods even that you think are healthy, if you actually look into how they are produced and processed by Big Food, they’re not very healthy for you,” Cortes said.
“We now have a diet as a society that thrives, unfortunately, and centers on ultra processed foods, and in part that’s because of policy. I’m not excusing people making bad choices, but policies subsidize and promote these foods to an overwhelming degree. Our tax dollars are supporting and subsidizing ultra processed foods, which are great for those producers, but not very good for the rest of us, and certainly not good for our health,” he added.
Cortes went on to connect the rise of ultra-processed food to the decline of family farming and the increasing dominance of corporate agriculture, detailing how tobacco companies, once dominant in American consumer markets, pivoted in the 1980s into processed foods using the same addictive tactics they had used to market cigarettes.
“Big tobacco saw the writing on the wall, saw the potential in food companies. These are the best marketers in the world, so they said we know how to market. What they also then figured out…was that they could use the same laboratory practices, the same scientific methods to make food as addictive as cigarettes are. There are plenty of ways to do that, and as you might guess, it’s not very healthy for us,” Cortes stressed.
Explaining how these corporations engineered food to be hyper-palatable and addictive by stuffing them with sugar, seed oils, and additives, Cortes said America has seen skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity and chronic illness as a result.
“It’s really alarming: 40 percent of American adults are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. This is the most alarming: Half of all children now deal with a chronic health situation. That was 1 percent a generation ago. Also, 75 percent of young men in America are medically unable to serve in the military,” Cortes said.
“If you look at obesity charts in the United States, they were relatively stable until about the 1970s. And then, in the 1980s there was a spike upwards, in particularly childhood obesity. Child obesity was almost unknown…now, it’s half the class if you walk into most classrooms in America, and part of that is lifestyle choices,” he added.
The documentary also discusses the economics of healthcare, Cortes said, noting that despite spending more than any other country—four times more per capita than Italy, for instance—Americans are significantly less healthy.
“We spend more than any nation on earth on healthcare, even looking at peer nations. Compared to Italy, a peer nation and advanced country, we spend four times per capita on healthcare, and Italians are far healthier than we are by every metric,” he said.
Amid this, Cortes expressed optimism about the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda as a growing populist movement that could unify Americans across political lines.
Ultimately, Cortes said he views the MAHA initiative not just as a political cause but a moral and even spiritual mission.
“I see this as not just political, not even just societal, I think there’s a spiritual aspect to this and for those of us who are believers, God gave us our bodies to thrive – not to manage chronic illness. He gave us these bodies to thrive. He gave us the earth to grow, bountiful, quality, healthy food. I believe this is more than just political, that’s part of it, but I really believe this is a spiritual mission,” he said.
Live October 21 https://t.co/DkyT1zTNjQ
— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) October 21, 2025
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
