Reviving the Presidential Fitness Test Is Worth a Shot

Donald 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.”

About the Author

Jack Butler

Jack Butler is a former submissions editor at National Review.

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Donald 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.”