The sinister reason Trump revived the presidential fitness test

As an adult, I’m fairly athletic, working out nearly everyday. I’m not going to win any gold medals on my spin bike, but just getting to this point in my life has been a quiet triumph. But as a kid, I was branded terminally unfit, a label that took decades of internal work to overcome. Much of that trauma goes back to the infamous presidential fitness test. Like many childhood asthmatics, my condition peaked around 4th grade, about the time when kids also start developing the keen sense of cruelty that will define their junior high years. Despite my condition, I was put through the ritual humiliation all too many kids from the 1950s through the early aughts endured: Attempted feats of strength, like pull-ups or shuttle runs, all performed for an audience of mocking classmates who enjoyed my failures.

I was a couch potato for years, hobbled by the enduring shame of being labeled a weakling, even after I outgrew asthma. I would put on running shoes and panic, remembering the frequent taunts from classmates, and give up to read instead. Eventually, fear of losing my health as I aged forced me to work through this shame. I discovered that exercise can be fun and empowering — something I would have likely known much sooner if I hadn’t been subject to bullying as a child in the name of “fitness.”

Over the decades since the presidential fitness test was first implemented in the late 1950s, health experts increasingly criticized it for not only being ineffective, but also counterproductive. Turns out ritually humiliating kids does not lead to positive attitudes about exercise. Russell Pate, an exercise scientist at the University of South Carolina, told the Washington Post it had the effect of “mostly making a lot of kids really want to skip gym class.” This is why President Barack Obama ended the program in 2012, instead replacing it with FitnessGram, which was focused on health and didn’t pit children against each other in gym class. 

But because anything bullying-related turns him on, Donald Trump brought the presidential fitness test back over the summer. This isn’t just about his lifelong love of cruelty, though. It’s part of the larger MAGA project, led by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of using the amorphous concept of “wellness” as a justification for taking away people’s health care. Worse, it’s rooted in a deeply unscientific notion that the measure of how healthy you are is how you look on the outside — and no, children aren’t exempt from this hot-or-not evaluation of “health.”

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy insisted last week, defending his belief that he knows better than actual doctors. “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street. And I see these kids who are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements.”

“I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look,” he said, continuing his conflation of health with child beauty pageants. The blather about “mitochrondrial challenges” is a reference to pseudo-science peddled by “wellness” influencers. Mostly it’s about using science-y sounding words to harp on what these quacks say is the singular source of all American health problems — sedentary lifestyles and junk food. “Mitochondrial challenges” is just another way to call people fat.

In praising the return of the presidential fitness test, Kennedy cited the aesethetic improvement of children as the primary goal. “You look at the pictures of what kids looked like back then,” he told Fox News, “and it’s almost like a different species.”

There’s no doubt that Americans could eat better and exercise more. No one disputes this, or that the lack of healthier habits burdens the health care system. But Kennedy is not sincerely trying to improve public health. As Jessica Winter of the New Yorker documented in late August, the Trump administration has decimated programs to improve access to healthy foods, while rolling back regulations that reduce pollution. This is about creating a pretext for stripping away health care from millions of Americans. If all poor health outcomes can be blamed on eating jelly beans, then there’s no need for people to have doctors, vaccines or treatments for afflictions ranging from flu to cancer. Just eat better. And if you die, it’s your fault for not getting enough fiber.

This argument isn’t even subtext. “If Kennedy is able to do what he wants to do as the head of the HHS, we won’t even need health care,” Zen Honeycutt, a Kennedy ally, argued in December. She’s one of the most prominent of the “MAHA moms” Kennedy uses as anti-science propagandists. “I’m saying we won’t be going to the doctor’s because we won’t be sick.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who made a fortune hawking useless supplements before being appointed by Trump to run Medicaid and Medicare, has repeatedly echoed this rhetoric, albeit in a more dodgy way. Last month, he defended Trump’s plan to kick millions off Medicaid by telling CNBC that people on Medicaid don’t “get out of their homes and go do things.” Instead, Oz said they “[watch] about 6.1 hours of television” or pursue other leisure activities. This is misleading, and for reasons anyone who can do math should see: Even assuming someone gets 8 hours of sleep a day, people still have 10 other hours left. That’s plenty of time for work and exercise.

Even Kennedy and Oz’s bizarre “hiking” stunt from last month was about implying that exercise is a cheap substitute for medical care. The video of their adventure drew a lot of scoffing because Kennedy, as he often does, was working out in jeans, which looked especially stupid when he attempted rock-climbing. But more distressing was Kennedy’s insistence that “sunlight is medicine” and Oz arguing that if “you walk 15 minutes a day, you save the country $100 billion in health expenses.”

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the surface, these comments don’t seem like a big deal. Yes, walking is indeed good for you, even if it’s just on city sidewalks and not through the wilderness, as in Kennedy and Oz’s video. But the context makes their claims sinister. Not only are these two actively fighting to cut off health insurance coverage for millions, Kennedy is taking away preventive care for millions more. The high-profile firing of Dr. Susan Monarez, who directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and rash of resignations at the agency last week were a direct response to Kennedy’s efforts to destroy vaccination programs, starting with his severe restrictions on the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Kennedy’s infatuation with letting infectious disease spread certainly cuts against his claims that he wants people to exercise more. (As an exercise fanatic, I can say that catching COVID-19 was the only time I’ve skipped multiple days in a row in the past few years. Being sick makes working out hard!) Instead, it speaks to Kennedy — and Trump — being stuck on this idea that how someone looks is the only legitimate measure of health. Being invisible, viruses fall outside what these two self-appointed medical experts care about. As Tressie McMillan Cottom noted in the New York Times last month, “Kennedy is indistinguishable from a beauty influencer” in that he believes “[h]ealthy choices are self-evident in beautiful bodies.” Viral infections don’t make you ugly or fat — some people even lose weight while sick — and appearances are all MAGA cares about. 

Wellness influencers often earn their money on shame. By making audiences feel like they aren’t skinny enough or their skin isn’t clear enough, they can convince people they aren’t “healthy” — and need to shell out big bucks on supplements and skin care products that promise to address surface appearances. Unsurprisingly, these MAHA types also believe it’s good to shame kids for not getting gold medals at athletic competitions.

In celebrating the return of the presidential fitness test, MAHA Action trumpeted that “it wasn’t ‘inclusive,’ caused embarrassment for students who didn’t meet the benchmarks, and focused on ‘athletic ability’ over ‘personal improvement.'” They added, “This sense of embarrassment may seem harsh—but it’s exactly what pushed American kids to pursue excellence.” Never mind that research shows the opposite is true, and that kids like me often avoided exercise because of the shaming.

But that is the point: To weed out the disabled kids, the clumsy kids or even average kids who will never be athletic superstars. In the MAHA vision, where “wellness” is a competition, the only people who deserve health are those they deem “winners.” Doctors may say that nearly everyone can benefit from exercise, even if they’re never going to a gold medalist. However, In the MAHA world, fitness is only reserved for the cream of the crop, who often happen to be the people with the wealth to pay for personal trainers and expensive beauty treatments. The rest of us don’t even get access to basic medical care.

This elitism was embedded in Trump’s announcement of the test’s revival. He didn’t surround himself with doctors or health experts, most of whom would object to treating health like it’s a competition. He was flanked by MAGA-friendly professional athletes, and Trump spent much of his remarks praising their good looks and athletic accomplishments, at least when he wasn’t getting distracted by airing his endless and incoherent grievances. The event overtly conflated “health” with being a professional athlete, a status only a tiny fraction of Americans could ever achieve. The rest of us, clearly, are expected to just give up on trying to keep our worthless bodies alive and well.

In response to the White House resurrecting the test, the New Yorker’s Zach Helfand wrote an amusing essay titled, “Can President Trump Run A Mile?” Of course he doesn’t need to answer that, because we all know the self-described “perfect physical specimen” can’t handle walking a city block, let alone running a mile. Nonetheless, I endorse Helfand’s idea: “Trump could perform each of the exercises in his own test. Kids could then compete to beat him.”

It would be hard for the president’s self-deluded narcissism to overcome being bested by the 9-year-old asthmatics he is so eager to humiliate. But it might help illustrate why it’s preposterous that anyone should listen to either Trump or Kennedy on the subject of health. Unfortunately, right now, people are listening to them.

Kennedy and Trump are exploiting a larger toxicity of our culture, which confuses competitive notions of “wellness” with actually being well. Far too many Americans are in the “MAHA mom” mindset, which treats health like an individual contest to be won instead of a baseline right of all Americans.