“Ripped to Shreds” is a biweekly column by Jaxon Havens about fashion politics.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to see “fat generals,” and not just because it makes it harder for him to picture having sex with them when he’s drunk. On September 30, Hegseth assembled admirals and generals in Quantico, Virginia, lecturing them about the “decades of decay” in the armed forces. Hegseth further explained what changes in the military’s functioning will look like. Physical fitness standards for women will be raised to those of men, and the clean-shaven rule will be strictly enforced, snuffing out a supposed infestation of “beardos,” claiming to care about troops’physical condition, Hegseth declared:
“It’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon, and leading commands around the country and the world. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”
Belittling the nation’s military personnel is glaringly distasteful. Soldiers who sacrifice years of their life to serve their country should not be judged on whether or not they are a bit pudgy. Body fat does not determine whether someone is meeting the military’s standards of physical performance. This is why Hegseth cites “unprofessional appearance” instead of performance. Yet, this kind of aesthetic attack falls perfectly in line with MAGA’s obsession with cruel spectacle.
Hegseth’s speech has raised plenty of critiques. It is not difficult to think that his over-gelled hair made him look like a snake-oil salesman as he touted the fact that he’s a published author to the captive audience of military personnel. Yet, the most buzzworthy critique was hammered in by California governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom posted an image of Donald Trump removing his suit jacket at a McDonalds, exposing a white shirt clinging to his love handles and flabby chest, and captioned it “I guess the Commander in Chief needs to go!” The critique is obvious. The head of the military, President Donald Trump, would not fit the same standard expected of lower generals. Is Trump so powerful that he is exempt from these critiques of appearance?
Make no mistake: Trump is fat—as fat as he is stupid, which is to say, very. But this has not stopped Trump from employing “fat” as an insult to others in the past. Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado recalled being called “Miss Piggy” by the President, and his attacks on Rosie O’Donnell’s weight are too numerous to list. In more recent history, Trump joked at a 2024 rally that Chris Christie was busy “eating right now” and could not be bothered. When a fan shouted something out, Trump jokingly scolded, “Don’t call him a fat pig.”
As recently as two weeks ago, Trump made a jab at users of Ozempic, or as he calls it, the “fat pill,” claiming that while he knows many people who had taken Ozempic, they did not look like they lost much weight at all. Trump positions the use of drugs like Ozempic as personal failures of health and wellness. While this does not reflect the reality of Ozempic users’ experience, it is an easy way to punch down. Fat people must stay fat and can’t inject themselves with enough anti-fat drugs to become normal. Trump’s cruel words have been key to his rise to power and his cultivation of a viciously mean MAGA culture, so his attack on weight-loss drugs is no surprise.
Newsom’s critique of Hegseth’s anti-fat campaign could easily invite a smile. The narrative of bodily appearance indicating physical fitness and military strength has been turned against the conservative politicians who seek to employ it. Similar coy critiques from liberal ideologues arrived when Trump first entered politics. In 2019, Democratic primary candidate Andrew Yang claimed that Trump is “so fat” he could only beat Yang in an “eating contest.” In 2020, Anderson Cooper likened Trump to an “obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun.”
Amusing as it is, this kind of clap-back is misguided. Some have already discussed the question of body shaming being universally harmful—you point one fat finger at someone else and ten fatter fingers point back at you. In 2018, Chrissy Stockton wrote in Harper’s Bazaar, “When You Call Trump Fat, You’re Actually Calling Me Ugly,” discussing that when the object of hatred becomes fatness itself, fat people who have no connection to the topic can be hurt by the insults. If you started to think of yourself when reading about Chris Christie’s “ham hocks” of legs, you too might hope for an ideological shift toward kindness.
That is to say that back-and-forth fat shaming is a sticky form of affective politics that never stays with the speaker. The ability to attack someone for being fat unpredictably slips from person to person. By moralizing fatness, fat people of all political orientations lose—no one is left unscathed. Yet, someone could be fat and still not be a bad person. It is up to an enlightened politics of solidarity building to go beyond image-based attacks.
This issue is not only one of body shaming, but of obscuring the political context beneath the fat. Hegseth does not want fat troops. He is the head of the newly renamed Department of “War” which is tightening its expectations of appearance and raising the requirements among combat positions such that women’s requirements (like the number of chin-ups one can do) are raised to those of male troops, effectively reducing the number of women in combat roles. Hegseth is curating an army that conflates physical worth with low body fat while reinscribing gender stereotypes and selectively privileging hyper-masculine ideals of fitness. Yet, any gym-bro who has been through the bulking-cutting cycle will tell you that obsessing over being cut is not great if you want to optimize bodily strength. So Hegseth’s stark redefining of who “belongs” in the military extends far beyond both aesthetic appeal and the biological realities of strength training—it is, at its core, a restructuring of who qualifies as eligible to access power.
The renaming of the Department of Defense and the rigidity in standards signal the streamlining of young American male bodies to be suited up and thrown into the open maw of the war machine. But this time, the war machine is not only committed to toppling overseas regimes, but may even turn against the nation’s own citizenry. Also on September 30, Trump confirmed that he intends to send the national guard into Chicago, and potentially wants to use Democrat-led cities for military training. Illinois governor JB Pritzker pointed out that his tactics echo those of Russia’s “Vladimir Putin, sending troops into cities, thinking that that’s some sort of proving ground for war.” On one hand, the news about “fat generals” may be a spectacle aimed at lightening a shift toward military mobilization. Yet, by focusing on the intense need for uniformity in the military, Hegseth seeks to strengthen the military machine by crushing the individuality of its members, allowing no room for dissent, and creating a source of optimally efficient brute force that could be used as a tool for evil.
Trump would never meet the physical fitness requirements of military troops due to a combination of old age and obvious fatness, but these are standards he will never have to meet. Fatness has been historically seen as a sign of wealth and luxury, associated with excess consumption and a lack of manual labor. Trump’s fatness presents the same old dynamics of consumption and power. He is not storming Chicago himself. Trump instead gets to send young, fit men to torment the nation’s cities while he sits back and watches, bloated with power.
With the threat of authoritarian control looming, it is important to not mistake Hegseth’s aesthetic attacks about “fat troops” for random cruelty. None of it is random. These are the aesthetics of mobilization, and of the authoritarian regime.
