Critics of Trump’s move seem unable to separate their criticisms from their politics.
D onald Trump is not our most physically fit president. That honor probably belongs to other Republicans: Abraham Lincoln, a renowned wrestler, or to Gerald Ford. Unfairly maligned as a klutz by Saturday Night Live, the accidental president was hardly accident-prone on the football field. He played for the University of Michigan’s national championship teams in 1933 and 1934, and was voted the Wolverines’ MVP in 1935.
Nor is Trump our least physically fit president. That dubious distinction probably belongs either to the famously rotund William Howard Taft, or to Grover Cleveland, Trump’s fellow non-successive two-termer. Cleveland was a gout-sufferer known as “Uncle Jumbo” who believed that “bodily movement alone, undertaken from a sense of duty or upon medical advice, is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life.”
Yet maybe it is true that Trump cannot run a mile, as the New Yorker’s Zach Helfand recently argued. Thus did Helfand join the crowd of skeptics and cynics of Trump’s recent relaunching, by executive order, of the Presidential Fitness Test, a government-sponsored series of physical challenges for schoolchildren (among them a one-mile run). The order claims that Trump “is addressing the widespread epidemic of declining health and physical fitness with a time-tested approach celebrating the exceptionalism of America’s sports and fitness traditions.” Reviving the test will not alone solve the health problems of America’s children. But critics of the revival are more focused on partisanship than they are on presenting a meaningful health agenda.
Easiest to dismiss are the sufferers of post–gym class stress disorder. The test was introduced in 1966, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson; Barack Obama ended it in 2012. That gave several generations exposure to its fluctuating combination of running, stretching, pull-ups, and other exercises. Based on how some outlets have reported on Trump’s revival of the test, you’d think most of these former kids still haven’t recovered.
Many “still recoil at the mere mention of the test,” a report in the New York Times claims. “For them, it was an early introduction to public humiliation.” A representative sample of recollections in a recent Washington Post article simply reads: “It was the single most discouraging part of the school day.” Various experts conveniently agree.
But even these accounts are somewhat self-refuting. The Post’s compendium of complaints doubtless self-selects for strong antipathetic sentiment. It nevertheless cannot help but to include a few testimonies from people who felt positive about the test. “I believe this program instilled a lifelong understanding of the importance of fitness,” one of them recalled. And the Times admits that “some still proudly remember passing the test with flying colors and receiving a presidential certificate,” and relates the story of Steven Magness, an accomplished runner and fitness expert who first discovered his running abilities thanks to the test. (I have a similar story.)
A stronger argument acknowledges the importance of getting kids to be active, but denies that the test is the best way to do it. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Brookings Institution expert in childhood development, told the Times that despite her lacking “fond memories of trying to do chin-ups,” she believes “we need something.” She favors a structured program that eschews the pass/fail structure of the test. According to the Post, Fitnessgram, the test’s successor, already works this way: Most children pass it.
And how is that working out? If the Presidential Fitness Test did not prevent the rise of childhood obesity, the post-test landscape has been far worse. Even before Covid, about one in five people in the U.S. ages 2 to 19 were obese. The Covid lockdowns’ general discouragement of communal and physical activity made this worse. Something is going seriously wrong here. Trump is right to draw attention to it, and to suggest something to do about it. It’s worth a shot. It ought to be one of many such efforts, ideally from the bottom up and not requiring federal government action. The benefits of a competitive element, and of the possibility of failure, could well inspire essential virtues in children.
Critics of Trump’s move seem unable to separate their criticisms from their politics. But the test’s history shows it is reasonably apolitical. Dwight Eisenhower, often the recipient of bipartisan respect, was the first president to worry about the deteriorating fitness of American children; it was he who got the ball rolling on what would become the test. And John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, lamented the “increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies — whose physical fitness is not what it should be — who are getting soft.” As in other areas, by launching the test, Johnson tried to do what he thought Kennedy would have done. What’s good enough for Camelot used to be good enough for the left. Not so much anymore.
Helfand believes that “no one needs an enumeration of all the positive effects of exercise, on health, on social connections, on self-esteem, or otherwise.” But there is plenty of evidence that we do. The reflexive dismissal of the test is not just indicative of a self-defeating contrarianism that has already resulted in fitness culture and healthy eating being seen as right-wing. It is a sign of a broader failure of some of Trump’s critics to admit when he has a point — even if he doesn’t have the best presidential fitness.