The New Yorker:

By reviving the Presidential Fitness Test, Trump is joining his predecessors in setting forth a competition that he would likely fail at.

By Zach Helfand

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’sa 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.”

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