That’s some serious brownnosing.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a longtime fitness freak, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Army infantry officer, have credited President Donald Trump as their inspiration to get “fit, not fat.”
Kennedy, 71, challenged Hegseth, 45, to a fitness challenge on Monday that required them to rush to complete 50 pullups and 100 pushups in less than 10 minutes.
Impressively, both men said they succeeded with minutes to spare. Bizarrely, though, each credited their passion for fitness to Trump, who is famously exercise-adverse and a lover of fast food.
“It was President Trump who inspired us to do this,” Kennedy said in a clip recorded after the challenge, which was hosted at the Pentagon Athletic Center and featured troops from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps.
Hegseth, an ex-Fox News pundit, added in a cadence made for TV, “Thank you, President Trump, for setting the example. Presidential physical fitness, Make America Healthy Again, fit, not fat.”
Trump, 79, is not typically viewed as being the pinnacle of healthy living.
The president’s cankles have been spotted in recent public appearances, including during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In that same trip, cameras captured him struggling to walk in a straight line before he greeted his counterpart.
Perhaps such things are to be expected from a politician who is pushing 80. Still, Trump was far from the face of clean living during his first White House stint.
A book by Trump’s first-term campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, revealed that the then-candidate’s order at McDonald’s included “two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.” That tallies up to a whopping 2,400 calories. Trump also hosted elite college athletes to the White House during a government shutdown in 2019 and infamously fed them a spread of his favorite fast food offerings.
Later that year, the White House physician announced that Trump had officially become obese. The 6-foot-3 president weighed 243 pounds and recorded a Body Mass Index of 30.4, making him clinically obese by the CDC’s standards. At his last weigh-in in April, the White House said that Trump had slimmed down to 224 pounds.
There are more recent examples that Trump, who is also a known Diet Coke fiend, has not kicked his love for the Golden Arches.
During his hush-money trial in New York last summer, in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts, aides to Trump were spotted hauling bags of McDonald’s into the Manhattan courthouse. Months later, at a college football game, Trump reportedly placed an order to his suite that called for two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches with cheese, stadium hotdogs, Domino’s pizza, and, of course, a Diet Coke to wash it all down.
Those orders were before Kennedy became squarely part of the Trump coalition, however. Sources told the New York Post in September that First Lady Melania Trump and Kennedy were “ganging up” on Trump to get him to eat healthier. However, no proof has emerged that their efforts have amounted to anything.
