Last week, the federal Health and Human Services Administration website posted a video of HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working out with Trump-aligned musician Kid Rock. Titled “Rock Out Work Out,” it featured head-banging music and two retirement-age men goofing around, getting in hot tubs, saunas and cold plunges, playing paddle ball, eating healthy food (we think—they were promoting raw milk which can also be really unhealthy), and using exercise machines in a home gym.
RFK Jr. was wearing jeans, his standard workout gear, and Kid Rock a pair of baggy black shorts. Both remove their shirts early in the video: the Secretary reveals his trademark testosterone-pumped torso, while the musician—well, looking like he has been living on Pop Tarts and Kool-Aid in one of ICE Barbie’s detention centers.
But before I lean into the body-shaming, let me just say this: there was virtually nothing in the video that would cause an average American to be inspired to re-up at the Y or join the local food co-op. In fact there was no actionable information at all, other than: men, grab a piece of exercise equipment and go!
Fortunately, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023) jumped into the fray almost right away from her perch at MS NOW.
“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,” Petrzela writes. “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.”
We used the opportunity this strange video offered to dig a little deeper: what should an administration that really cares about Americans becoming healthier be doing? How and why has RFK Jr. misfired so badly on the common sense advice and policymaking that past presidents, Republican and Democratic, have promoted with grace and skill?
Short takes:
* Trump administration Border flak Greg Bovino deliberately dressed like a Nazi storm trooper in Minneapolis, but he’s not the only one: federal social media seems to be positively dripping with messaging and inside jokes that reference the Third Reich. “So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?” Tom Nichols asks at The Atlantic. Looking back as far as the Reagan administration, Nichols argues that the tipping point was the Tea Party movement that arose in 2010, political organizing that advocated for a big tent on the right. Since then, the GOP “has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.” (February 23, 2026)
* While RFK Jr. dithers in the gym and looks for new fringe theories to promote, actual scientists released a study that points in one direction: teenagers should not smoke pot. “As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug,” Rhitu Chatterjee writes at NPR. “Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.” The numbers go down dramatically as the age of first use goes up. “Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.” (February 21, 2026)
* If you are conservative administration and you have lost the National Review—well, you have lost. Listing the string of disasters that have followed from Trump administration’s military attack on Minneapolis, NR writer Andrew McCarthy points out that “as any experienced law officer knows, a hostile environment calls for a soft touch. It must stress cultivation of relationships with local police; more numerous than the feds, they are also more sympathetic to immigration enforcement than are Democratic pols. Also required: understanding that what can be accomplished is severely limited by the assets available.” Instead, “Instead, Trump entrusted the Minneapolis mission to [Kristi] Noem, a sycophantic former South Dakota governor with presidential ambitions, whom he appointed to run the huge DHS bureaucracy despite her dearth of relevant experience.” (February 19, 2026)
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