The Constitution only requires a president to be over the age of 35, a resident for 14 years and a natural-born citizen. But former President Donald Trump says voters should demand something more.
Mr. Trump has proposed that candidates — and particularly his likely opponent, President Biden — undergo cognitive tests and even a drug test.
“He was high as a kite,” Mr. Trump complained at a recent rally after being unable to fathom Mr. Biden’s well-received performance at the State of the Union address this spring.
They are unorthodox demands for an unorthodox election featuring a pair of candidates the public is not thrilled about.
“I feel like we are one press release away from this whole thing turning into Feats of Strength,” said J. Tucker Martin, a longtime Virginia political operative who served in the inner circle of former Gov. Bob McDonnell. “Presidential campaigns won’t end until someone pins the incumbent.”
Mr Biden has shown no indication he will take Mr. Trump up on his demands, and Mr. Martin said the former president himself could face uneasy moments should other tests be added to the list. “Trump is in real danger with the ‘Business Ethics’ category,” Mr. Martin said.
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Mr. Trump’s demands — which also have included a lie detector test to suss out whether, well, Mr. Biden is full of malarky — are gamesmanship of the more extreme order.
Still, they play on a long-running sense among voters that they should demand something more of their president than a 35-year-old body with a lucky birthplace.
In the early days of the nation, the belief was that voters should strive to reward the most virtuous among their candidates, which roughly equates to who was best able to put the people’s needs above their own interests.
No less than James Madison wrote the “aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
There have been plenty of implicit tests, too.
Until President Kennedy, voters expected their president to be protestant. Until President Obama, voters expected their president to be White. And to date, voters have expected their president to be a man.
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Military service has waxed and waned as an important test in voters’ minds.
And a tax scandal involving President Nixon ushered in new expectations about presidential candidates’ willingness to be open about their finances. After that, every major political party nominee published his or her tax returns — until Mr. Trump broke that unwritten rule in his 2016 run.
Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, said Mr. Trump said he was undergoing an audit and would release his returns when the audit was done.
“Trump has never fulfilled this promise,” Mr. Lichtman said.
He also said there has been an expectation that the president’s doctor would release a summary of his annual physical, but that’s never included the type of cognitive test Mr. Trump is demanding of Mr. Biden.
“I am not surprised by anything that Trump does which violates norms or expectations. Clearly, he is trying to play on the false narrative that Biden lacks the mental capacity to serve again as president,” Mr. Lichtman said.
Larry Jacobs, an elections expert and professor at the University of Minnesota, said presidential expectations have changed over time as people have demanded more personal exposure to the candidates.
“Many didn’t know that FDR was paralyzed because they saw him seated and there were few images of him with crutches or in a wheelchair,” Mr. Jacobs said. “JFK had debilitating back pain that required injections and the press didn’t cover.”
“Expectations about mental acuity is a more recent phenomenon,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and his family probably governed for him at the end. We only found out about this later — much later through historical research.”
That started to change in the early 1970s.
George McGovern’s running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was forced to step aside after it was revealed that he suffered from bouts of depression that led to hospitalizations.
Mr. Trump isn’t the first candidate to tell voters what they should care about.
When Democrats tried to make Ronald Reagan’s age an issue for voters in the 1984 campaign. Reagan famously defused the “age issue” by saying he wouldn’t use “my opponent’s youth and inexperience” against him.
Reagan won reelection in a landslide.
Democrats this year have urged voters to impose an insurrection test on the candidates and say Mr. Trump’s behavior surrounding the 2020 election should be disqualifying.
They have argued that’s even a requirement of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Courts grappled with the issue, with the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the ballot.
The Supreme Court, in its ruling, ducked the big question about insurrection but said the states can’t kick a president off their ballots by citing the insurrection issue.
Experts said Mr. Trump’s demands for Mr. Biden lack those sorts of lofty constitutional questions.
“Ah, testing for competency! Or is it raising doubt about Biden’s?! Yes, it is!” Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University, said in an email. “But there’s nothing ‘sinister’ here. Innuendo about your opponent’s lack of qualifications is a necessary tool of successful politics.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.