The scandal-plagued fitness guru who created the Trump admin’s visual playbook

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., July 16, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

President Donald Trump's two election victories were largely powered by the so-called "manosphere," a group of right-wing men who insist they are aggrieved for being male and wish to reassert supposedly traditional masculinity. Yet according to a new report, many of these men are seeking to maximize their physical excellence by following a fitness guru who is plagued with scandals.

"He was also accused by former employees and CrossFit athletes in a New York Times exposé of creating a culture of 'routine and rampant sexual harassment,'" reported The Guardian's Edward Helmore on Sunday. "[Greg] Glassman denied such conduct. A spokesperson said the negative accounts were 'a collective effort to devalue the company and buy it for scraps.' He linked racism and the Black Lives Matter movement to the pandemic, tweeting 'It’s FLOYD-19.” He once said on a Zoom call: 'I do not mourn George Floyd.'"

Helmore added, "Stories about profligate spending on private jets, restaurants, alcohol, Mariachi bands and stays at the Four Seasons emerged; Glassman explained he was not the CEO of a publicly traded company caught with his hand in the till. 'The till was mine,' he said. 'I owned 100 per cent of the company.'"

Helmore then spoke with Calum Marsh, author of "The Glass Box" and himself a former regular user of CrossFit.

“CrossFit pursued and cultivated an affinity by naming workouts over fallen service members and plastering its website with images of people in the military, guys jumping out of helicopters and doing pull-ups on the end of a tank," Marsh told Helmore.

Helmore continued that "the association, though never formalized, stuck, and can still be seen today in Trump administration figures, including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who made physical fitness a military priority and his own physical training, a centerpiece of his command."

Helmore continued, "Robert F Kennedy Jr also has prioritized viral fitness challenges and high-intensity workouts that mirror CrossFit, along with displays of his own physique. Hegseth and Kennedy launched the online “Pete and Bobby Challenge” as part of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) platform."

“There’s a big premium paid to being perceived as being manly and rugged, and that totally ties into the early Bush-era, CrossFit style,” Marsh told Helmore.

Ross Morales Rocketto, political consultant and founder of the 2024 political group White Dudes for Harris, warned a podcaster in July that Trump is actually losing support among men, a group that fled Republicanism in droves in the 2026 midterm elections.

“Donald Trump went from 50 percent approval in this country, that means he had some independents on his side; then he went down to 40 percent, which basically meant any independents he had, those people are gone,” Rocketto said at the time. “They're bailing. He's losing some concerned conservatives. Then you go from 40 to 30 percent and you're literally losing millions of your followers. It means you are losing millions upon millions of your followers, and a lot of them are dudes. They're just guys that kind of got recruited into the movement. They felt like it was cool to back Donald Trump since it was provocative. They don't pay attention to politics. They're like, ‘I don't know. Everyone hates him. Could be kind of cool to see this come back into office.’” Yet he added that because of Trump’s various unpopular domestic and foreign policies, “now they're not happy with what they are seeing. Do you think this is a significant pickup moment? And what might we look for in the numbers at the midterms to see whether folks have really started to bail and gone to the other side?”

Marsh has previously written about the intersection between fitness and politics in 2025, when he covered the alleged right-wing associations of the Pilates fitness movement for The New York Times.

Writing about MaryBeth Monaco-Vavrik, a 24-year-old barre instructor and fitness influencer living in Washington, D.C., Marsh described an Instagram video she posted in which she argued that "pilates is great for your core strength, and for people who are suffering from connective-tissue weakness, etc., but how do we separate that from the fact that its marketing is extremely exclusionary? It’s extremely whitewashed. It’s based on wealth. It’s based on thinness.”

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