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Their policies may divide the country, but on social media, the president’s men are all crushing it as influencers, bro.
They’re in the locker room and the gym, and they’re not going to let matters of state force them to skip leg day.
► FBI Director Kash Patel took a break from law enforcement to chug a celebratory beer with the US men’s hockey team after their gold medal win, his latest trip on a government jet controversially blending work and pleasure.
► Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most recent workout video is a banger in which the chiseled politician exercises shirtless in jeans in a wood-paneled sauna with the entertainer Kid Rock before they drink whole milk together in a hot tub.
Kennedy has bonded with the music star since Kid Rock “made the decision to change his depraved, debauched and famous dissolute lifestyle,” Kennedy told Fox News.
In recent weeks, Kennedy, a recovering addict, also opened up to the podcaster Theo Von about his drug-fueled past.
“I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats,” Kennedy said, explaining that he wasn’t afraid of Covid-19.
Kennedy also teamed up this month with Mike Tyson, who served three years in prison for rape in the 1990s, for a PSA to spread the gospel of weight loss by eating “real food.”
► Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has posted multiple videos of himself bench-pressing. Hegseth has worked himself up to 315 pounds on the bench. That impressive weight could make up for the questionable form he exhibited in previous videos featuring pullups and kettlebells.
Who says the leader of the Department of War, as the Trump administration calls the Pentagon, can’t have a little fun while preparing for possible military action against Iran? Hegseth would not have been able to join in the beer chugging, however; he swore to give up alcohol while in office after his pre-Pentagon partying became an issue at confirmation hearings.
For these middle-aged men, proving they can be one of the boys is a key part the image they’re presenting online.
Social media strategy has been an important part of the Trump administration’s PR, including the propagandist action movie-style videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s much-discussed photo ops in various uniforms.
Noem’s videos put her at the center of immigration enforcement. Other top members of Trump’s administration want to seem fit for military service.
► Vice President JD Vance posted photos of himself joining Navy SEALs for a beach workout in December. He climbed ropes, jogged and hopped in an inflatable boat. (Vance, a former Marine, deployed to Iraq as a public affairs specialist in 2005.)
The man at the top, President Donald Trump, is known for engaging in locker room talk — but he is also a teetotaler and is notoriously opposed, on a philosophical level, to the idea of exercise, so don’t look for beer-drinking or workout videos from him. But his campaign benefactor and former DOGE chief Elon Musk posted an AI-generated video of Trump, in a business suit, playing hockey against Canadian players.
Trump called in on Patel’s phone to congratulate the men’s team after their overtime win and invite them on the fly to Tuesday’s State of the Union Address.
Trump promised he would do whatever is necessary, including dispatching a military plane, to get the men’s hockey players to Washington, even if it requires landing in the snow.
He did caution he would also have to invite the women’s team, which also won a thrilling overtime win against Canada last Thursday, or else, “I would probably be impeached.”
The president has spent a good bit of time during his second term promising to save women’s sports from what he and others frame as the threat of transgender athletes, so it was jarring to hear him mention the dominant women’s team almost as an afterthought.
The women’s team in a statement on Monday thanked Trump for the offer but declined, citing previous “academic and professional commitments.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Monday that the House would try to figure out the logistics of accommodating hockey players for the speech, Politico reported. The address takes place in the House chamber, which is typically overstuffed for the annual event.
The Patel video shows the noted hockey fan in a locker room celebration, but he has, like Hegseth, also moved to impose new fitness standards at his agency. He wants FBI agents to be like police in addition to their more traditional investigative role. That includes requiring female agents to do at least one pullup.
“If you wanna chase down a bad guy and put him in handcuffs, you better be able to do a pull-up,” Patel said during congressional testimony.
Patel has also posted workout videos, including his attempt at Kennedy and Hegseth’s challenge for service members and others to do 50 pullups and 100 pushups in less than 10 minutes. Patel posted his version from his official FBI director account on X.