What Pete Hegseth’s Kettlebell Swings Tell Us About MAGA Ideology

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likes to be videotaped working out with the troops. He’s shown off his push-ups and now his kettlebell swings. Hegseth is bad at push-ups, and he might be even worse at swings.

Now, generally speaking, if a guy who imagines himself a paragon of fitness wants to show off, and wants to show off that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, that’s not a big deal. In part because it’s so common—we’ve all seen these guys at the gym. In part because, who cares?

But Pete Hegseth isn’t just another meathead at the gym trying to impress women and fellow bros while instead demonstrating how little effort he’s put into developing skill in what he tells the world he’s skillful at. Pete Hegseth is the self-proclaimed Secretary of War in the second Trump administration and a self-proclaimed warrior of the MAGA ideology. His showing off isn’t (just) to impress any women or bros who might happen upon his Instagram feed. Pete Hegseth’s showing off is intended to convey a message about, or a particular image of, MAGA ideology. The reason America needs to be made great again is because it’s no longer great, and the reason it’s no longer great is that men far weaker than Pete Hegseth, or far weaker than Pete Hegseth tells himself and all of us he is, have corrupted it away from manliness and strength and manly strength. Pete Hegseth, and the rest of the second Trump administration, do what fascists always do, which is to project what they believe to be intimidating power through images of what they believe to be traditional masculinity. And for fascists like Pete Hegseth and his colleagues in the second Trump administration and his fans on social media, traditional masculinity means muscles and the threat or willingness to use them to inflict violence on those the fascists imagine to be weaker than themselves or weaker than their movement or weaker than their manly ideology.

So they perform. They put out memes of men with strong jaws and T-shirts too small for their biceps and chins that exist only on Robert Z'Dar or artificially with a lot of cutting, sawing, anesthetic, and subsequent and rather unmanly swelling. They perform because they think other fascists will watch and feel pumped up in their ideology and because non-fascists will watch and get scared of the fascists. They put up those memes, or they threaten Greenland, or they dress up like soldiers and slip on Minnesota ice, or they do kettlebell swings.

And they think they look good and tough doing it. Pete thinks he looks good doing those swings, or else he wouldn't be filming himself doing them. It represents a kind of cognitive inversion: in order to maintain the self-image of the warrior, the mind must repaint the reality of the clumsy movement into a perception of grace. He thinks those swings signal how manly he is because only a real man, it seems, can awkwardly lift a bell without properly hinging and driving with the hips.

You might be tempted to think that, probably, Pete recognizes that much of Trump's base aren’t legitimately manly guys, but instead incels. Or instead shlubby men, the sort who maybe played high school football, once, and think, or tell their wives they think, they could've made it big, but now get winded carrying groceries into the house. You might think Pete knows his swings are crap, but also knows the people watching won’t know that. But that’s to misunderstand MAGA ideology. It is a movement wholly consumed by the maintenance of a constructed identity. When there is no substantive reality to the self—no actual expertise, no cultivation of skill—the self must be continuously hallucinated into existence through performance. So Pete’s narrative of self-identity paints the white nationalist fans in Dear Leader’s personality cult as modern incarnations of the Spartan warriors who existed historically in Plutarch’s stub biography of Lycurgus, but exist more clearly in the minds of Pete and those shlubby guys as they appear in Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s wet dream, 300. Except those Spartans would've done better swings.

The problem isn’t, it’s worth pointing out, the bad form itself. A kettlebell swing is a technical movement; it takes some time and effort and practice to learn, even if not a lot. You don't start off good at it. You might need some coaching. That's okay. Nor is the problem not caring to do that practice or get that coaching. Maybe kettlebell swings aren't your thing. Maybe you want to put your time elsewhere. That, too, is okay.

The problem, and it’s as core a feature of MAGA ideology as there is, is that Pete believes he knows how to do swings, believes it enough that he wants you, and his MAGA fans, and all of America to watch him do them and be impressed by him doing them. And not just impressed, but awed. His enemies, or the people he's decided are his enemies, he wants overawed. And yet, his bad form means he looks like everyone else who is bad at doing swings, and if you know what they're supposed to look like, your reaction isn't awe, but instead the thought that the guy up there, awkwardly lifting a kettlebell with the troops, is kind of a moron.

That’s the core of MAGA ideology. It’s a rejection of expertise by people too lacking in ability, or too lacking in motivation, to develop expertise, and so who reject the idea of expertise itself, by attacking and demeaning experts, but also by performing as if inexpertise is the height of badassness. It is a fundamental lack of the internal protective quality that warns us when we are debasing ourselves. A competent person possesses a sense of conscientious self-respect that acts as a check on their behavior—a voice that says, “This is beneath me.” Hegseth and MAGA lack this guardrail. You want to look tough and scary and awe your opponents? Do something brash and loud and poorly.

I’ve called MAGA an auto-humiliation movement. It’s a philosophy—not just political, but social and personal, too—that latches onto tropes of manliness and strength, whether historically authentic or inauthentic but repeated enough in popular portrayals of a certain sort to feel authentic, and then performs them without realizing how frankly stupid they look when you don’t get them right.

It’s like as if the Star Wars kid waved his golf ball retriever around and filmed it not because he wanted to have a bit of fun, but because he thought, if the video got out, he’d seize the reins of political and cultural power.

You see it in right-wing influencers waving around swords and thinking you really can get the girl if you study the blade, and then raging against feminism when it turns out girls want something else.

And you see it with Pete Hegseth’s kettlebell swings. Pete Hegseth is an incompetent alcoholic. There’s nothing inspiring about him, and nothing particularly scary except insofar as our political system’s guardrails failed to such an extent that Hegseth’s erratic personality can lead to real harm.

Hegseth’s swings are, in other words, a quintessential example of MAGA in practice outside of White House policy. Here's a guy who understands the world and himself so poorly that he'll humiliate himself and call it strength. We’re fortunate, it should be said, that MAGA is this way instead of wanting competence to advance its ends. These guys are bad at everything they do, and that badness, while still allowing them to be profoundly dangerous, makes them less dangerous, or less able to sustain their dangerousness, than if they put the effort in.

So let’s all agree not to help Pete Hegseth improve his swings.