At first, it seemed like a sight gag, possibly AI-generated. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, California, in June 2023. His stretched mask of a face, wincing in a weird, imagined grievance, is rendered invisible by unveiling his ridiculously and obscenely developed chest and shoulders. More than a few fans of The Simpsons had flashbacks to Homer’s annoying, pious neighbor, Ned Flanders, pulling off his shirt to reveal a surprisingly chiseled physique. RFK Jr. wanted the world to know he was ripped, and here was the straight-faced disclaimer: He got this body without juicing up on steroids. He told Inside Edition that he did not take steroids, only “testosterone replacement.”
But despite Kennedy’s explanation of his supplements, it’s not quite that simple. As someone who authored a 2000 New York Times lament about steroid use titled “Baseball Must Come Clean on Its Darkest Secret,” reported for The New Republic from Berlin on the legacy of the East German doping freak show, and helped write Juiced, the memoir of steroid slugger Jose Canseco, I politely call bullshit on the independent presidential candidate.
Steroids and synthetic testosterone are two names for the same thing. Allow me to quote from the Drug Enforcement Agency: “Anabolic steroids are synthetically produced variants of the naturally occurring male hormone testosterone that are abused in an attempt to promote muscle growth, enhance athletic or other physical performance, and improve physical appearance.”
The DEA lists the variations on the same basic molecule: Testosterone, trenbolone, oxymetholone, methandrostenolone, nandrolone, stanozolol, and boldenone. Put simply, it’s all about dosage. Think of the late broadcaster Rush Limbaugh on opioids: Take a modest dose, as prescribed by your doctor, and it’s health care; gobble pills like candy, and you’ve become a drug abuser. To this observer of the steroid scene, Kennedy gives every indication of being in the latter category and expecting the prestige of his last name, age, and wealth to shield him from scrutiny. He may be proved correct. Despite a few stories about how he came by that weird physique, the media hasn’t shown much interest. Perhaps they will, now that The New York Times has reported Kennedy’s claim that a parasitic worm was eating at his brain.
Would that politics were more like sports. If you’re a Major League Baseball player and you bulk up on synthetic testosterone—as opposed to the natural testosterone the human body produces—like disgraced sluggers Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds, you’re a juicer, a cheater, a steroid user. You will be insulted and kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame because the Baseball Writers Association of America voters who decide who gets enshrined in Cooperstown have chosen to come down hard on juicers. However, if you’re a former heroin addict (as is Kennedy), 70, and you bulk up on “testosterone replacement,” packing on garish knots of muscle that no senior citizen could naturally attain, then you’re just following your doctor’s orders. Maybe if Kennedy gets on more ballots, this will become an issue, but for now, it’s not.
One reason RFK’s pecs and delts triggered my suspicion is this other familiar sign of a juicer, a blithe I-don’t-work-out-that-much posture. The independent presidential candidate claims his daily exercise routine merely lasts 35 minutes, and the widely circulated video of him pumping iron shows him bench-pressing some very light weights. This brought back a lot of memories for me. I remember sources talking to me about Oakland A’s baseball players who stood around in the weight room, hardly lifting, but were insanely ripped, which was a strong indication of juicing. It’s telling that RFK Jr.’s nephew, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, has been riffing on his uncle’s inflated muscles. Jack Schlossberg, the son of Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, channels a southerner named Wade who raises horses and says, “You can always tell when a horse is being pumped full of testosterone—steroids doesn’t make the horse think any better.”
For perspective on this presidential spoiler with a six-pack, I reached out to John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Texas, the author of multiple books on sports, including Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping, one of my go-to sources over my 20 years of writing about steroids. “What Kennedy is doing, perhaps out of ignorance, is failing to mention that testosterone is the basic anabolic steroid,” Hoberman wearily explained. “The two terms [testosterone and steroids] refer to the same substance. Testosterone can also be modified to intensify either muscle-building or androgenic (male sex traits) effects. The claim that it’s not ‘steroids’ because a doctor has prescribed it is simply a lame alibi that is intended to gentrify the image of the anabolic steroid the doctor has given him. Kennedy wants the effects without the image problem anabolic steroid abuse has created, and he has enlisted the doctor as a kind of character reference for himself.”
Christine Pelosi, the daughter of the former House Speaker, has no steroid expertise, but I think she was spot on when she told me, “It is weird, a guy who is against all those vaccines, he clearly is putting something in his body that’s synthetic.” He was against better living through chemistry—until he was for it.
Democrats have watched Kennedy’s presidential bid with a mix of eye-rolling dismissal and gut-wrenching fear that he might tip a few closely fought states into Donald Trump’s column and send Mar-a-Lago Mussolini back to the White House. (Few Democrats have forgotten Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid.) Moreover, Kennedy seems to hold greater animus toward President Joe Biden than the soon-to-be GOP nominee. The anti-vaxxer who wrote a national bestseller about why Anthony Fauci is an enemy of the people and thinks Ashkenazi Jews have some magical resistance to COVID makes little secret of his antipathy toward Biden and the Democratic Party that was his ancestral home.
Of course, RFK Jr. could take more votes from Trump than Biden. Steve Bannon, the oft-indicted Trump advisor and self-styled Leninist, wanted RFK in the race, and he got him. What if the Kennedy scion’s appeal, such as it is, is mostly more of an “own the libs” kind of thing? Seeing RFK Jr. as a juicer—the cheater, the narcissist, the crank who applauds Israel in Gaza but wants to cut off arms to Ukraine—helps us understand why, for example, at the Oakland, California, event where he revealed his vice-presidential pick, wealthy techster Nicole Shanahan, reporters found more Trump supporters than Biden ones.
I focus on the juicing because it matters: It’s admittedly a fine line between getting a little bump of T from your doctor, putting a little hop in the step, and going overboard to a testosterone boost. Baseball players mostly juiced because it made them feel good and, therefore, more confident. Former Yankee Jason Giambi, one of the few to come clean somewhat on juicing, used to have an elaborate spiel on how the key to hitting a baseball was to “Feel sexy!” going up to home plate.
Suppose Hoberman’s suspicions were correct, and RFK Jr. is abusing testosterone. That’s not a crime even were it true, but it’s worrisome nonetheless in a man who aspires to be president, a job where you do not want someone with a history of addiction screwing around with mood-altering substances. You don’t want roid rage to be an issue if, say, China invades Taiwan. The irony abounds. The guy who sees menacing actors behind tried-and-true vaccines has put himself on a dangerous path where, as he gets older, he’d likely have to hit the T even harder to get the same results. That’s just biology.
And there’s no question, as I’ve seen myself firsthand, that juicers end up not only with mood swings, runaway irritability, and a general inability to listen to anyone else, but they also tend to find their mental functioning—especially their memories—going through a certain Swiss-cheese transformation. The holes in what they recall keep getting bigger. None of these are New Frontiers you want in a presidency. If a brain worm has indeed affected the independent candidate and recovering addict’s memory and cognition, steroid use would add to the problem.
Assuming he never gets anywhere near the Oval Office, would knowing Kennedy takes steroids hurt his candidacy? Alas, it’s hard to see that it would. Trump is a congenital cheater—golf, women, paying contractors, running charities, to name just a few. Not only does it not hurt him with his followers, but in some quarters, it’s a plus. “He’s just an amazing cheater!” the sportswriter Rick Reilly, author of Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, told me. “He doesn’t have the shame gene. There is no embarrassment with this guy. I’ve talked to 20 guys who called him on it. Trump told them, ‘I cheat on my wife, I cheat on my taxes, you don’t think I’m going to cheat at golf?’”
It’s smart, Trump thinks, to cheat.
“Golf is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a guy,” Reilly said. “If you cheat at golf, you cheat at everything. Trump has never broken 90 when there’s a camera there! Never! This guy is the Queen Mary of cheating, and for people who want to self-aggrandize, he’s their hero.”
Reilly, having long studied Trump and his cheating, predicted before the 2020 election that if Trump lost, he would try to weasel out of it. “If you’re a narcissist, your brain won’t let you lose. You can’t cope if you’re not the best at something.”
So maybe the popularity Kennedy enjoys echoes Trumpian self-love and self-aggrandizement. If Trump is, to be charitable, The Music Man—a roguish con artist—RFK Jr. seems more like a cross between Conspiracy Theory and The Incredible Hulk, a steroid-addled kook. Still, he’s a steroid-addled kook who can talk about “Uncle Jack” and “Uncle Ted” and, of course, his father—a figure so beloved that Black and white Americans lined the railroad tracks to see the train carrying his corpse, make its way from Los Angeles where he was shot on the night of the 1968 California primary to Washington, D.C.
Another irony is that athleticism was key to the Kennedy brand. You don’t have to have been raised on Teddy White’s The Making of the President 1960 to flash from any mention of “the Kennedys” to envision scenes on the lawn in Hyannis Port, the handsome crew casually throwing around a football but also playing to win. Yes, performance-enhancing drugs were part of the picture in Camelot; just what drugs JFK was given to get him through the PT-109 back pain that racked him years after World War II might require a cataloguer of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s virtuosity.
But the first RFK had a lithe physicality; he was no mountain of muscle like former Kennedy-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is divorced from Maria Shriver, or his pumped-up son, Robert. For the slain senator and attorney general, the physical was social, about being out with people. As NPR recalled in February 2013, “Fifty years ago this Saturday, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy went for a walk—a 50-mile walk, to be exact—trudging through snow and slush from just outside Washington, D.C., all the way to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. He had no preparation and no training. And despite temperatures well below freezing, he wore Oxford loafers. … The impetus for Kennedy’s strange and incredible feat was a challenge issued by his brother, John—then president of the United States. The Kennedys were notoriously athletic, and JFK, in particular, was concerned about the decline in American’ vigor.’” The famed President’s Council on Physical Fitness was born during the New Frontier, and that was before we all became supersized.
Full disclosure: I was raised on the Kennedy idea of “vigor.” Or vigah as it was pronounced. My mother served with Dianne Feinstein on the Democratic Central Committee of California in the 1960s. When I turned eight in 1970, I remember attempting to scrub our kitchen counter clean and not having much luck. Did I need something other than a wet sponge and dish soap? My mother smiled at me and said, “You have to have ‘vigor’”—giving the word the full Back Bay pronunciation—“like President Kennedy said.” For some reason, the word—the ideal—stayed with me. They shaped my life, oddly enough, with “vigor” being about self-starting and energy and stamina, not about bloating or vanity or injections, pills, and creams. She talked up vigah after Jack and Bobby were gone, and Chappaquiddick had hindered Ted because the idea was so innervating. I’ve run three marathons and have yet to jab myself with a steroid needle or do the cream and the clear.
Juicing is a “me” drug. No wonder RFK sought former pro wrestler and former Minnesota Governor Jesse “the Body” Ventura, an admitted past steroid user, as a running mate. It’s on brand. How many Trump supporters are men over 40 who get a little chemical help? Or, in some cases, a lot of chemical help and run off into the woods, like a character out of a Carl Hiaasen novel trying to hump an upright vacuum cleaner? When Bob Dole was among the first pitchmen for Viagra in the late 1990s, it was just the beginning of a nation of worried men turning to science and, often, quackery to stay youthful, just like women had been doing.
There is a larger point about Kennedy, Trump, and our times: Angry, aggressive, resentful men who risk roid rage and its lesser variants by hitting the T hard are not necessarily a group that can be shamed. Although it was meant to be a cautionary tale, Juiced, the book I wrote with Canseco, actually led to a surge in the use of testosterone. We’ve all seen the ads about low T, as if men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s are supposed to have high testosterone levels. But the pitches all sound so soothing and medical. These days, cheating Mother Nature is natural. Getting soft like your dad and grandpa is weird.
“The many steroid-dispensing doctors who have supplied sports dopers have betrayed their medical responsibilities and are anything but character references,” Hoberman continued. “Many doctors are dispensing ‘supplemental’ testosterone on the assumption that it can be a mood or sexual enhancer. So, the ‘low testosterone’ diagnosis is often whatever the doctor wants it to be before he collects his fee.”
In “Are We Not Man Enough?” a 2011 piece for The New York Times, I noted that total testosterone prescriptions in the United States had jumped from 1.75 million in 2002 to 4.5 million in 2010. The number only shot up after that. “Too often, the Steroid Era in baseball turned into a game of sanctimony and whodunit, distracting from the more important question of why we, as a culture, want our athletes comic book pumped up and artificially enhanced,” I wrote in the Times. “And it helped us avoid recognizing that, from Hollywood actors on human growth hormone to weekend athletes, to men in their 40s or 50s or beyond who just want to feel less blah because of ‘low T,’ we are on the cusp of an Age of Juicing.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that RFK Jr’s “testosterone replacement” regimen will be considered cool even while he treats COVID-19 vaccines as a Pharma/tech industry plot to enslave the world. With any luck, we’ll rule out the threat of him electing Trump, and we won’t have to listen to his raspy rants about wi-fi and autism. I fear that even then, the ridiculous Gold’s Gym video of Bobby Kennedy’s son will be an image we cannot erase from our minds, not only because it’s so…yuck…but because it resonates so deeply in our coarsened culture.
