Heather Diehl/AP
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s affinity for public exercise was once again on display this week, with the 71-year-old health secretary and his transportation counterpart, the former reality star Sean Duffy, staging a pull-up contest inside Ronald Reagan National Airport to promote Make Travel Family Friendly Again, an offshoot of the department’s larger push to bring “civility” back to American travel.
“Yes, sir!” spectators cheered on, impressed by the performance of brawn before them.
“He’s coming for you!”
“Woot!”
Yet amid the delight of Kennedy’s onlookers, I registered a rising discomfort. This felt especially strange considering that I should have been relieved to see Kennedy with a shirt on. That, for once, we did not have to bear witness to the sight of this man’s pectoral muscles. But no, instead, a creeping instinct that what I had witnessed was not in fact real began to overwhelm me. Something about the jerking motions and the form with which Kennedy managed to “beat” Duffy in this contest struck me as profoundly wrong.
Were these actual pull-ups? Was the government lying to me?
I was in no position to sound the alarm. So I reached out to Casey Johnston of the newsletter She’s a Beast.
“The correct way to do a pull-up is from a dead hang at the bottom (arms fully extended), then pulling oneself all the way up to the point that the chin passes the upper side of the pull-up bar, all the way back down, repeat,” Johnston wrote in an email. “We can see that all of RFK’s pull-ups are about 1/4 of this range in the middle, neither fully extending all the way down, nor pulling himself up above the bar.”
My heart stopped. My theory that something was off was starting to prove correct. That’s when Johnston reflected my horror back to me:
Crucially, this also must be done without any thrashing of the body or kicking of the legs, as this extra momentum takes a lot of the work out of actually pulling oneself up with one’s upper body. Around count 15, Kennedy starts to kick his legs. At no point does RFK do an actual pull-up. They count 20, but the number of actual pull-ups done here is zero.
There we have it: another conspiracy unraveled; the government appears to have falsified information in its efforts to promote a $1 billion program that does not address far more systemic issues facing American travel. But through investigation, I have uncovered a small truth: RFK Jr. did not perform a single pull-up at Reagan National Airport.
