The Trump administration’s latest public health announcement features Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and bad-boy musician Kid Rock participating in various wellness activities — including the sauna, pickleball, cold plunge and fan bike — at moments, curiously, wearing jeans and guzzling tall glasses of whole milk. Much of the subsequent commentary has emphasized how revolting and ridiculous the spectacle is by mocking their push-ups, disdaining Kid Rock’s deconditioned “skinny fat” physique, imagining the bacterial buildup in sweaty denim and noting the unintentionally homoerotic “Heated Rivalry” energy of their intimate escapade, set primarily in a wood-paneled spa and a blue-lit grotto.
Much of the subsequent commentary has emphasized how revolting and ridiculous the spectacle is.
All jokes aside, the sobering fact is that the RFK Jr.-Kid Rock video isn’t just another example of questionable online fitness content, but an official message from our federal government, paid for with our tax dollars, which advises us to “work out and eat real food” even as it cuts science funding and SNAP benefits and generally undermines other bedrocks of our public health establishment.
This stunt is more than just a disgusting distraction; it signals the dark reality of what MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — now unapologetically embraces, rather than what it might have been. Rather than promising a wholesome, if highly idealized, world in which individual fitness and diet choices offer all Americans who are willing to work for it a path to civic and moral salvation, this video makes clear that to Kid Rock, RFK Jr. and the administration behind them, fitness and food are primarily props for alpha-male preening, entirely disconnected from any policy that will actually make more Americans healthier and happier, in their bodies or their lives.
It didn’t have to be this way. As I’ve written in these pages, RFK Jr.’s appeal grew in part because of the way he addressed real health problems important to many Americans: the inaccessibility of mainstream medicine, the ubiquitousness of unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and the preponderance of prescription medications upon which so many Americans, including children, rely.
Preventative health measures such as engaging in regular exercise and eating healthy food are not panaceas, but when so many interlocking, systemic factors inhibit our health, it is true that these individual acts can feel like the only available actions a person can take to feel a bit better now. Especially to young men who are major consumers of online fitness and motivation content, this message has understandable appeal. Sincere or not, it is that language of hope and possibility expressed in earlier videos, featuring children running in the forest, families enjoying a salad or RFK Jr. promising to hire “honest public servants” to clean up the nation’s food and water supply. Even a video like that of septuagenarian RFK Jr. doing calisthenics outdoors with a bodybuilder against the Venice Beach blue skies intimates a world in which older people are active, healthy and socially engaged.
The vibe has shifted, this latest video makes clear, and not only from an earlier version of RFK Jr., but from decades of federal public health messaging on diet and exercise, on both sides of the political aisle. These efforts were deeply imperfect in many ways, but they all connected exercise with self-actualization and with maximizing participation in a healthy, active life. President John F. Kennedy, the health secretary’s uncle, implored Americans of all ages and backgrounds that it was their civic and moral duty to participate in recreational fitness, emphasizing that those who sit on the sidelines are more likely to sit out as citizens as well; he mobilized the most significant commitment to public physical education this country has seen.
The vibe has shifted from decades of federal public health messaging on diet and exercise.
President Jimmy Carter’s administration told a generation of girls that for the first time had legally guaranteed access to sports that “physical fitness is beautiful.” President Ronald Reagan awkwardly posed for journalists between sets on a Nautilus machine, and he celebrated the virtue of vigorous outdoor activities such as chopping wood. President George W. Bush gave interviews about how running had transformed his life, especially after quitting alcohol. Michelle Obama recruited Beyonce to lead a dance workout in a school cafeteria. None of these efforts were sufficient to solve America’s complicated health problems, and at times the efforts relied on problematic assumptions, but all of them earnestly endeavored to link fitness and nutrition to an aspirational ideal of individual and national self-improvement.
While RFK Jr. once very much positioned himself as part of this tradition — even using grainy footage of JFK’s physical education programs in early campaign videos — such commonalities are now hard to find. JFK, for example, commissioned a jingle that dictated a workout routine, “Go, You Chicken Fat, Go Away!” to be distributed to physical education teachers. It’s catchy, if cringe, to link fat and cowardice, but consider the contrast between this ode to toe-touches and jumping jacks with the Kid Rock song used in this week’s spot, which shouts out “topless dancers,” “Southern Comfort” whiskey, “crackheads,” “crooked cops” and “caps of meth.” The different ways the two Kennedys invoke militarism also matters. JFK featured rows of fresh-faced, disciplined youth practicing military drills to defend their country in the Cold War. Kid Rock and RFK Jr. appear to be having a relaxing boys’ weekend, and a random selection of patriotic imagery, clip art of an eagle, a poolside Statue of Liberty and American flag is interspersed throughout the PSA.
Speaking of boys, where are the women? They’re not only conspicuously absent from this scene, but they feel absent from most of RFK Jr.’s fitness and health promotion. Whether he’s promoting pull-up bars at airports, showing off his shirtless workouts or now training with Kid Rock, RFK Jr. doesn’t seem to think that women should be among those Americans getting into the best physical shape.
Women are absent from his federal fitness promotion effort in a way they have not been since the Eisenhower administration, when such efforts were narrowly defined to train soldiers who would see physical combat. This omission is especially notable given the Trump administration’s professed commitment to “defend women’s and girls’ sports.” So where are these female athletes? We see them at the Olympics but not in Kennedy’s PSAs.
Instead of offering any aspirational or idealistic messaging about the benefits of movement and nourishment, MAHA delivers us a dark, depressing manosphere mashup that showcases a disconnected assortment of fitness activities, halfheartedly undertaken, as accessories for alienated men who embody a decidedly uninspired and unambitious form of masculinity that is a break from the optimism of even the earlier RFK Jr. America deserves better.
