Subtlety is not a word I would ever use to describe the Trump administration. If anything, I would say that Donald Trump and those in his cabinet use more words per individual point than any other administration. In the history of all other administrations, they are definitely one of, if not the most, verbose.  

Anyways. 

Despite the well-established persona of this executive branch, I found myself in a situation where I was surprised. The impetus, I may be slightly embarrassed to admit, was Mike Tyson’s Super Bowl commercial. I was practically on the floor laughing. In the ad, the former boxing legend narrates the dark period of his life in which he struggled with eating uncontrollably–an unbelievable “quart of ice cream every hour.” The quick close-up cuts, the awkward storytelling, the overly sentimental editing: the video resembles an edit from a political satire meme page. The banner at the end commanding “Eat Real Food” is the element which revealed that this was not a Super Bowl ad for Ozempic, which is honestly what I thought it was, but rather a public health campaign. 

As a nursing and public health student at Boston College, my laughter started to subside. I thought, Did the government seriously make this? Comparisons popped up in my head to iconic campaigns of our past: “Got Milk?” or “Just Say No,” maybe even the more recent “Know the Truth About Vaping” ads we’ve all seen before. As the clip of Mike Tyson calling himself “fat and nasty” is currently circulating on the internet, it’s not hard to tell that there is something different here, something wrong. 

It’s important to note that many public health campaigns by the U.S. in the past have not been effective, and it’s also true that public health is no exception to lobbying. Nevertheless, I believe they are still important. They reach the general population. They make people pause to think about their health. They even become a part of our culture (how many D.A.R.E. shirts have you seen on college campuses?). I think it’s important that we pay attention now to this campaign, as evidence of the more subtle, yet just as powerful, changes that are unfolding during this presidency.   

“Eat Real Food” is the campaign at the forefront of the Make America Healthy Again initiative led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. It aims to reconstitute the nation’s nutrition guidelines to minimize processed food in the American diet. I am not critical of this intention; actually, I think it’s quite necessary. Do I still think that this campaign caters to an upper-class audience and neglects the ethnic diversity of our country? Absolutely. 

But what I’d like to focus on for now is that the message from Mike Tyson, which says that this country is full of “obese, fudgy people” lacking the willpower to control their diet, is also now the message of the Department of Health and Human Services. It came off so ridiculous for a public health campaign that I thought it belonged to a parody about public health campaigns. 

That’s it though: the parody. The irony. The joke. These features constitute the more subtle acceptance of Trump’s worldview into our society, especially among the younger generation on the left–isn’t that how his 2016 presidential campaign was seen in the first place? By pausing before we laugh, we can see that with this new presidential administration, our healthcare is adopting not only an agenda but an attitude: prejudiced and degrading. Obesity is a disease, not a reflection of one’s character, and it would destroy me if one of my patients thought that I viewed them as “nasty.”

This is not a public health campaign long dead and debunked. As much as I wish we could laugh it off and all wear shirts saying “Fat and Nasty,” you can’t make fun of the past when it is still the present. What appears ironic is reality, and it hurts people. 

Gaelyn Grant

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