The United States could be engaged in a military conflict with Iran as soon as this weekend. But what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants every American to be reassured about is this one very important thing: His glutes stay glued to the bench when he’s pumping iron.
“Gotta keep the butt down,” Mr. Hegseth said, presumably to himself, as he attempted to bench press over 300 pounds on camera.
“Don’t touch it!” Mr. Hegseth yelled seconds later to dissuade his teenage son, who was spotting him, from helping him hoist the weight. The defense secretary then successfully racked his weights and posted the video to social media on Thursday.
There, it received lots of feedback. “Bro, go do your job,” read one comment. “Benching 315 is really impressive even if you don’t like him,” read another.
In another corner of the Trump administration’s virtual locker room, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week posted a video of himself in which he wore jeans in a hot tub, chugged a glass of whole milk and rode an exercise bike in a sauna. These activities were all performed shirtless and under the supervision of the musician Kid Rock.
Every day, the men in these videos (well, not Kid Rock) make choices that have the potential to alter the lives of countless Americans, whether it is through changing vaccine schedules or unleashing U.S. firepower around the world.
But they still find a way to work out and hang out — just guys spending time together and filming it! In fact, most things Mr. Trump and his advisers do tend to be explained away as: Boys will be boys, and boy, do they have a lot of energy.
The 90-second video Mr. Kennedy released with Kid Rock (government name: Robert Richie) earlier this week had a policy objective, somewhere in there. But more than a few viewers who watched it struggled to decipher what, exactly, was happening. USA Today called it an “erotic workout video.” Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of “Morning Joe,” declared that she could not “unsee” it.
The video, called “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock’s Rock Out Work Out” and set to the tune of “Bawitdaba,” the rocker’s 1999 hit single, sees the duo strip off their shirts, wave an American flag by a swimming pool and do sit-ups together. This was done in the name of promoting Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which is organized around whole food and exercise.
At one point, Kid Rock raises his middle finger to the camera, because boys will be boys, and he is a bad boy. Get it?
Boys will be boys at the airport, where, in December, Mr. Kennedy and Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, had a quick pull-up competition underneath a newly installed exercise bar. Boys will be boys on a sunny beach, where Mr. Hegseth recently joined Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, for a round of “tree pull-ups, a cold plunge, and a Mediterranean feast,” according to a photo spread shared Wednesday by Dr. Oz.
Boys will be boys in group chats; in October, Vice President JD Vance defended “young boys” who tell “edgy, offensive” jokes, after a group of Young Republicans were found to be calling Black people “monkeys” and declaring their love for Hitler in text messages.
Boys will be boys when they squabble publicly, as Elon Musk did with Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, last spring when they disagreed over tariffs. Mr. Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a sometimes Trump adviser, called Mr. Navarro a “moron” after Mr. Navarro said that Mr. Musk was a “car assembler” who was only interested in “cheap foreign parts” to build Teslas.
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- Iran says the U.S. has not asked it stop enriching uranium.
- Trump says he’s considering a limited strike on Iran to force a deal.
- A second attack on Iran could be deadlier than the first.
“Boys will be boys,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said brightly at the time. “And we will let that public sparring continue.”
Mr. Trump, who has long explained his behavior as a natural consequence of being too much of a red-blooded male, sits proudly atop the dog pile.
In 2016, his wife, Melania Trump, explained away a potentially devastating moment in Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign by dismissing his comments about grabbing women by the genitals as little more than “boy talk.” Mr. Trump, who has been held liable for sexual assault and accused of sexual abuse by several women, has denigrated his accusers as fabulists and opportunists, or otherwise unworthy of his sexual attention.
Whether voters believed him or not, they rewarded him. These days, Mr. Trump asserts his own version of masculinity just about every chance he gets.
“Young, handsome guy,” Mr. Trump said during a meeting of his world peace board on Thursday, as he praised the attractiveness of Santiago Peña, the president of Paraguay. “It’s always nice to be young and handsome.”
Mr. Trump seemed to catch himself being overly appreciative of the male physique, which maybe was not on manly message.
“Doesn’t mean we have to like you,” Mr. Trump quickly added. “I don’t like young, handsome men. Women, I like. Men? I don’t have any interest. Ha, ha.”
OK!
Mr. Trump was at it again on Friday, describing a meeting with a “powerful” man he met during a Thursday trip to a factory in Georgia. The president said that the man was so supportive of Mr. Trump’s tariff policies that he wanted to leave him with a token of his affection.
“‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly,’” Mr. Trump said the man had told him. “And I said, ‘No, thank you.’”
Mr. Trump’s latest masculinity proclamations sum up this administration’s hard-line approach to maleness, where the most powerful men in the country can just relax and be men who appreciate other men — in a strictly manly way, of course.
Last year, Mr. Vance defined the ethos like this: “Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”
All of this hints at a powerful political current that politicians like Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump instinctively know how to channel.
One of the defining themes of the 2024 election was the frustration of legions of young men, many of them working class, who felt that their masculinity had made them a target of negativity and discrimination. They had fallen behind women in education, their wages were stagnating, and some felt that they might not be seen as viable partners and providers. They helped re-elect Mr. Trump.
All of this overt manliness embraced by Mr. Trump and his top cabinet officials is a way to address and express those anxieties about masculinity, said Joan C. Williams, a law professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies social inequality, gender and class.
“One of the only arrows in his quiver is being the man,” Professor Williams said of Mr. Trump, suggesting that the videos were a superficial symptom of something more urgent.
“Picking wars all around the world,” she said, “that’s what’s really going on.”
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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