The 2024 presidential contest is getting … sweaty.
Politico published a round-up Monday showing how several candidates are unexpectedly turning the race for the White House into a battle of brawn. Former biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy is boasting about his tennis wins. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is bragging about his CrossFit workouts and his finishing time in an Iowa 5K race (he challenged Ramaswamy to a one-on-one race; Ramaswamy declined). Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is talking up his full-court basketball game. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has posted videos doing push-ups and lifting weights shirtless.
What’s going on?
Politico partly attributes this dynamic to candidates’ attempting to draw a contrast with the older front-runners in the race. President Joe Biden is 80 years old; former President Donald Trump is 77. Demonstrating physical fitness lets more fit candidates showcase their relative vitality and freshness to the electorate.
But I think the dynamic is better understood as a reflection of the increasingly pronounced emphasis on physicality in American political life — especially on the right. (It’s notable that the one Democratic candidate participating in these rituals, Kennedy, is also an anti-vaxxer who has drawn the most vocal support from the right.) While Trump isn’t bragging about his own physical feats — the former president famously shuns exercise because he believes people are like batteries, born with finite amounts of energy — his rhetorical emphasis on strength is central to the origins of today’s dynamic.
The best way to understand the increasing emphasis on workouts is ideological, rather than purely strategic. (And to be fair to Politico, its article discusses this as an underlying dynamic, as well.) Trump’s strongman politics, like many strongman political figures before him, involves constant attention to conventional signifiers of masculine physical strength. He mocks the disabled, describes women as being handicapped by their menstrual cycles and reveres big, strong guys. He encourages his supporters to deal with protestors violently. And I’m not sure there was a time when Trump looked happier in the White House than when he invited a bunch of college football players over to eat burgers with him.
This rhetorical emphasis on physical strength parallels his emphasis on military strength (big defense budgets, attempts to plan military parades) and on his authoritarian style of will-to-power politics. At every level, the idea is that strength should prevail.
Trump has typified and popularized this retrograde emphasis on masculine strength, but that isn’t to suggest that he has been the only source of it. MSNBC columnist Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a scholar of right-wing extremism at American University, has written about how far-right extremists have used fitness chat groups and mixed martial arts gyms as recruitment pools. As Miller-Idriss explains, a lot of it comes down to finding meaning in a kind of warfare:
Physical fitness training, especially in combat sports, appeals to the far right for many reasons: fighters are trained to accept significant physical pain, to be “warriors,” and to embrace messaging around solidarity, heroism, and brotherhood. It’s championed as a tool to help fight the “coming race war” and the street battles that will precede it. Recruits are encouraged to link individual moral virtues such as willpower, decisiveness and courage, with desired collective traits such as virility and manliness.
The argument here isn’t that enjoying fitness or combat sports makes someone right-wing, but rather that extremists view these spaces as opportunities to find people partial to an ideology that emphasizes the meaning of strength and force.
Beyond this, right-wing nationalists from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have spoken extensively about recovering old traditions of masculine ideals. (Oddly, in Carlson’s case, those ideals include testicle tanning.) To be clear, some of these narratives are a reactionary backlash against trans visibility and feminism — a defense of traditional masculine ideals to make the erosion of traditional gender norms more difficult. But ultimately they also lead in the direction of making the political culture of the right increasingly focused on physical strength.
If political candidates want to show off how strong they are, that’s their prerogative. And theoretically it could be a good thing if our candidates emphasized the importance of physical health, given how profoundly unhealthy the modern U.S. lifestyle is. But when the displays manifest as cringe-inducing competitive bro-fests, and some of the politicians in question are friendly to an authoritarian political movement, it’s a clue to how the ideas fueling these displays aren’t always coming from a good place.
