Not to be fussy about it, but the Presidential Fitness Test, which Donald Trump plans to reinstate in schools, could use some shaping up of its own. The name promises so much. What is this, a fitness test for Presidents? We could do worse than election via athletic competition; that alone might alleviate the whole gerontocracy problem. And most of the good Presidents would’ve still won. George Washington was an accomplished collar-and-elbow wrestler. (Some wrestling scholars claim that, during the Revolutionary War, a forty-seven-year-old Washington took down seven Massachusetts militiamen in a row.) Nixon, meanwhile, was a football scrub—“cannon fodder,” a teammate called him. Most people think our most athletic President was Gerald Ford or Barack Obama, but they’re wrong. In his rail-splitting young-lawyer days, Lincoln is said to have gone 300–1 in free-for-all wrestling matches against tough guys across the Midwest. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame; some credit him with inventing the choke slam. This would get more prominent billing in his biographies if the Presidential Fitness Test were what it sounds like, instead of what it actually is, which is a battery of physical assessments to evaluate the health of America’s schoolchildren. A better name would be the President’s Fitness Test, as in Lord Stanley’s Cup.
The old test was phased out more than a decade ago. Trump hasn’t said what the new one will look like. Previously, it involved a mile-long race, a shuttle run, sixty seconds of sit-ups, pull-ups to exhaustion, and the sit-and-reach flexibility assessment. Participants who scored in the top fifteen per cent of all five tests got a Presidential commendation. Presumably, any changes would be up to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition (now, there’s a sound name), whose members Trump introduced, along with the revived test, at a White House press conference a couple of weeks ago. Trump stocked the council with his sports-world buddies—Bryson DeChambeau, Harrison Butker, Mariano Rivera, Jack Nicklaus, Paul (Triple H) Levesque, and Lawrence Taylor, among them—most of whom, in various ways, are ill-suited to oversee an athletic program for minors. None of them have a background in exercise science. Taylor, a former N.F.L. linebacker whom Trump has referred to as “an incredible guy” and “a friend of mine for a long time—too long,” pleaded guilty in 2011 to two misdemeanors after paying to have sex with a sixteen-year-old. After putting him on the council, Trump asked him to speak at the White House about the project. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing,” Taylor said. “But I’m here to serve.”
The new council probably can’t do worse than the original council. The fitness test has its origins in a 1954 study that found that American children failed a suite of physical benchmarks about fifty-eight per cent of the time, compared with just nine per cent for children in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. President Eisenhower was alarmed about what this meant for the health of the nation and its military. He formed the council by executive order; it met at West Point and, in 1958, rolled out the test. The original looked similar to the most recent version, though it also included softball-throwing, which was a rough analogue for lobbing a grenade. (The White House says that the new test will also be, in part, about “military readiness.”) In addition to the test, the council issued a report warning that “the existence of press-button gadgets and other devices tending toward habits of inactivity” were fuelling a countrywide problem of “softness.” Softness was thought to be a grave national danger. In 1960, then President-elect John F. Kennedy published an article in Sports Illustrated called “The Soft American.” “Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America,” he wrote. “In a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.” He issued another public-fitness challenge, which required marching fifty miles in twenty hours. Boy Scouts marched, as did fraternities, high-school classes, postmen, and newspaper columnists. Robert Kennedy did it in oxfords. (The sixty-third annual march will be on November 22nd.) Subsequent Presidents, meanwhile, periodically updated the Presidential Fitness Test. Lyndon Johnson added a flexed-arm hang for girls; Ford swapped a straight-leg sit-up for a bent-knee sit-up.
There were a few early critics of the test. One congressman from Missouri pointed out, in 1955, that the study that inspired the test purported that American kids were absurdly wimpy: it held that European kids were seven times more fit. “Simply on the mathematical surface, this is a ridiculous statement,” the congressman said. In fact, the study was investigating back pain among Americans, and was mostly a test of core strength and flexibility. It had little to do with over-all fitness. One exercise instructed participants to lie face down and lift their feet off the ground. Another had them reach down and touch their toes. European participants were drilled in exercises like these in school, which probably explained their superior performance. The council, anyway, showed little interest in finding out if the Presidential test was effective; they rarely collected any data to determine if kids were improving. There’s not much evidence to suggest that it promoted physical activity in the long term. Kids weren’t tripping over themselves to sit and reach in their free time. The Obama Administration gave this as a rationale for ending the program, in 2012. Few people complained.
There was always something odd about a fitness test being set forth by the President, invariably an aging man who would lose miserably in his own competition if pitted against, for example, me. I hold a job that I perform mostly on the couch, and am otherwise a modestly skilled but enthusiastic recreational softball and tennis player, and yet I would destroy even the more youthful Presidents; I’ve seen Obama’s jump shot. Trump could beat me in golf, which is O.K. Golf—a sport you play only when age or incompetence prevents you from playing actual sports, and which few people, if they are being honest with themselves, actually enjoy—isn’t a proxy for how well someone might do on the test.
Trump and the other modern Presidents would almost certainly fail their own fitness tests. The mile and the shuttle run would present problems, given their ages, but the real obstacle would be the pull-ups. Pull-ups are hard. At Michigan, Ford was the center on the football team, won two national championships, and was voted the team M.V.P., but he was sixty-one when he came into the White House and around two hundred pounds. Is he getting thirteen pull-ups, the threshold for seventeen-year-olds to qualify for the Presidential commendation? He is not. I’m not even convinced that he could’ve done so as a hundred-and-ninety-pound teen-age lineman. As for Trump, I would not bet on him running a mile in six minutes and six seconds at the moment, nor even in his physical prime, given his bone spurs.
Fitness testing has been around almost as long as schools. One constant across societies is the belief, among the older generations, that the kids have gone soft. An early physical-education scholar noted that boys in Sparta went through similar assessments, including “what might be considered periodical tests of [the] capacity to endure, for at one of the annual festivals the flogging of youths was an essential feature, often carried to the drawing of blood.” Today, kids in Europe are tested in plate-tapping, hand-gripping, and something called the “flamingo balance test.” Some students in Australia are assessed on how far they can throw a basketball. No one needs an enumeration of all the positive effects of exercise, on health, on social connections, on self-esteem, or otherwise. Still, only a quarter of Americans get sufficient exercise, according to the C.D.C. Critics of the fitness test have pointed out that, by ritually humiliating a large portion of the kids involved, it probably discouraged exercise.
Obama’s response was to eliminate the testing portion and to encourage activity in other ways. But testing has its virtues. We test in math or reading to make sure students have the minimum levels of proficiency necessary to thrive in society. We could do the same for physical activities. No one needs to be taught how to touch their toes, and everyone who can run knows how to. But why not allow students to pick a more technically difficult activity to be tested on, like swimming or skating? The idea is to leave school proficient in some activity that might make you happy. The ability to swim in the ocean or skate on a frozen lake is a gift, a license to partake in some of the joys of being alive. Kids could learn how to hit a baseball, or to fly a kite—or to fish or to play wheelchair basketball. For kids who like boredom and pain, Trump could even create a proficiency test for golf. This could be a bulwark of democracy, not, as Kennedy envisioned, as a defense against armies of ripped Italian teens but, rather, as fertilizer for areas of common interest. At least it might provide counterpoints to the phone, or a small source of contentment.
This idea itself has actually been tested. Undergrads at Columbia have long had to swim seventy-five yards in order to graduate. A few years ago, Dartmouth replaced its swim test with a wellness requirement, which could be fulfilled through courses such as skiing, hiking, or kayaking. (There are also options for mini-courses on mindfulness, sleep, and reflective journaling.)
Another, if lesser, idea would be to make the test finally live up to its name. Every year, Trump could perform each of the exercises in his own test. Kids could then compete to beat him. And why stop there? There are other types of fitness—mental, Darwinian—that present the opportunity for more tests. In his first term, Trump took a cognitive-fitness test, meant to assess signs of dementia. “It’s, like, you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV,’ ” Trump explained. “They say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, it’s person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ ” He added, “It’s actually not that easy, but, for me, it was easy.”
And then there’s fitness for office. The Constitution tried to define this with the Twenty-fifth Amendment—a President is unfit if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the Presidency. But that’s pretty vague. No one has developed a test for this yet, but apparently Lawrence Taylor is available. ♦