Photo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demonstrates his ability on a new pull-up bar installed at the airport in Washington DC. (Screenshot)
On December 8, 2025, Paloma Duffy participated in a pull-up contest at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Also participating in the contest were Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy — Paloma’s father.
The event was part of a promotional effort for a new initiative aimed at enhancing airport experiences for families. Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Duffy had erected a pull-up bar outside a bathroom in the main concourse at Reagan National Airport.
Just to be clear, the aim is not to get people all hot and sweaty right before they board an airplane, but that might be an unpleasant side effect.
Secretary Kennedy struggled his way through 20 pull-ups. Secretary Duffy managed 10. Paloma outperformed her father, by completing 13.
Here’s the proof.
That’s about 13 more than I would have completed. Which has me a bit worried. Because it looks like America — at the instigation of the federal government — has begun measuring masculinity by “number of pull-ups”. We will soon be able to prove our manhood at U.S. airports, if our Transportation Secretary has anything to say about it.
A few journalists who covered this PR stunt by current Cabinet members noted, however, that Secretary Kennedy technically accomplished zero “pull-ups” during this documented exhibition. In order to qualify as an actual pull-up, they explained, a person must begin from a dead hang and then raise himself so that his chin is above the bar. Some observers complained that Kennedy’s “pull-ups” never included a full dead-hang and his chin never went above the bar. These were — according to certain journalists — “half-pull-ups”.
If you watched the video of Paloma Duffy above, you witnessed “real pull-ups.” Full extension, chin above the bar.
I mention that detail, just in case we’re concerned about how claims are made in the current administration.
Back when I was still working out at the gym, many years ago, a person’s manliness was reckoned by the amount of weight he could bench-press. Now we are erecting pull-up bars in airports. This could be an indication that the noble bench-press is being replaced as the measure of a man’s worth. Or a man’s daughter’s worth, in the case of Paloma Duffy.
If this airport PR stunt were our only evidence for such a trend, I probably wouldn’t have written about it. But Fox News recently shared a promotional video produced by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, featuring Secretary Kennedy and another Cabinet member, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The “Pete & Bobby Challenge”.
The challenge — presumably aimed at all of us, but especially at young adults who might want to enlist in the U.S. military for a chance to sink fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela — is to perform 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in less than 5 minutes.
Pete didn’t quite meet the challenge; it took him 5 minutes and 25 seconds. Secretary Kennedy was “right behind me.” (The actual “Pete and Bobby Challenge” website allows 10 minutes to complete these two tasks.)
“It’s all about making American healthy again,” Hegseth explains. “We’re going to be fit, not fat.”
The two Secretaries revealed that they had been inspired to create the challenge by their boss, President Donald Trump.
They did not indicate, however, whether their boss could actually meet the challenge in under 5 minutes.
Or, in under 10 minutes.
I was inspired to watch the pull-up videos — the airport contest and the Pete & Bobby video — after I came across an article in Mother Jones that mentioned Casey Johnston, author of two books on weightlifting and writer of the newsletter “She’s a Beast”.
Ms. Johnston’s newest book, A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, is an exploration of the history, science, and psychology of strength, blended with her personal story of learning to lift weights.
Ms. Johnston verified for Mother Jones reporter Inae Oh that a proper pull-up looks more like the ones Paloma Duffy performed at the airport. Not the ones Secretary Kennedy pretended to perform.
Apparently, there’s a lot of a lot of pretending out there, these days.
One interesting thing I learned about pull-ups. Many people think the value of this exercise is getting your chin over the bar. But that’s only half of a perfect pull-up. The other half is to let yourself down slowly.
From an article by Michael Andor Brodeur in the Washington Post:
A seasoned lifter, once hoisted above the bar, will instead take full advantage of the slow negative: that is, the gradual lowering of the body from the bar, maintaining tension and a savage burn the whole way down.
This is the source of real growth (and a little lesson): Strength has little to do with how we wiggle and wrench and half-rep our way over the top but rather in the grace we bring to the deepest strain, the lowest point, that moment when we decide to try again.
That’s the real key to building strength. The grace we bring to hitting our lowest point.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.