When it comes to what qualities a political leader should possess, a six-pack is probably pretty far down most people’s lists. However, it seems that brawn is increasingly valued over brains in the US, where several shows of political hyper-masculinity have grabbed the nation’s attention in recent weeks.
Last month, the 65-year-old incumbent mayor of New York, Eric Adams, decided that the best way to demonstrate superiority over his 33-year-old Democratic rival, Zohran Mamdani, was through the bench press. “The weight of the job is too heavy for ‘Mamscrawny’. The only thing he can lift is your taxes,” Adams wrote on X, accompanied by a video of him completing eight bench presses alongside Mamdani struggling to do two. Adams was echoing sneers from the wider conservative movement, which appeared to suggest that Mamdani’s struggle with weights implied some fundamental flaw in his character and, by extension, his politics.
The bench press-off came shortly after another overt show of muscular posturing. US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, released a video of himself and the 71-year-old health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, doing 50 pull ups and 100 push-ups in less than 10 minutes, their snug T-shirts clinging to toned torsos as they grunted at the pull-up bar. The “Pete and Bobby Challenge” was ostensibly part of an effort to get Americans healthy again. This outpouring of testosterone is to be expected from the current crop of Republicans under Donald Trump, a politician who, on the campaign trail last year, promised to protect women “whether they like it or not”.
Trump set the tone and his cabinet now seems determined to prove their masculine credentials. But it is disappointing to see Democrats jumping on the beefcake bandwagon. With the midterm elections approaching in 2026, when all seats in the House of Representatives and about a third of Senate seats are up for grabs, the party is desperate to reclaim some of the voters that they have lost to Trump. The young male vote is key, with men aged 18 to 29 swinging to Trump by a 12-point shift that helped him win the White House for a second time.
It seems that the Democrats think hitting the gym is one way to these young voters’ hearts. Perhaps it’s forgivable that Colin Allred, US Senate candidate in Texas, would hand out policy prescriptions from his home gym, barbells in the background, as he declared: “I’ve just finished my workout.” He is a former Tennessee Titans linebacker after all. But why did Mamdani feel the need to reveal his biceps? He won the Democratic Party nomination for the mayoral race with a smart campaign packed with policy suggestions that tapped into the genuine concerns of New Yorkers. Democrats should be taking note of his core messaging, not his core strength. But instead we see others, such as Colorado state representative Manny Rutinel, posting videos of himself doing pull ups as he promises to flip a Congress seat.
Perhaps they are trying to shift the perception of liberals being weak or weedy. But that’s hardly the main problem facing the Democratic Party right now. With Trump testing the limits of presidential power, there are countless issues affecting Americans that Democrats could engage with and they need a coherent and serious message to bring to the table. While the manosphere might seem like a good place to be positioning yourself, the posturing comes across as infantile. It would be much more useful if they could turn their attention to more pressing issues than bench presses.
Read next: What Democrats should learn from Mamdani’s personality-led victory.
