Donald Trump is resurrecting an archaic youth fitness campaign that has little to do with the overall challenges to well-being kids face today.
Among those standing over President Donald Trump last week as he autographed another executive order, this one reviving the presidential fitness test from Trump's favorite decade -- the pre-Civil Rights, pre-Voting Rights 1950s -- was a leather-skinned bearded guy with a shaved head and trap muscles distending down a thick neck, trying not to look like the hulking bouncer he resembled. I didn't recognize him until I saw a caption from the photo op: Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, from the professional wrestling theater.
What an oxymoronic choice to exemplify a healthy lifestyle for kids. But then, it's just like this president -- an overweight aficionado of fast food whose primary exercise appears to be clambering in and out of a golf cart -- to resurrect the archaic youth fitness campaign that has little to do with the overall challenges to well-being kids face today.
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Levesque is a retired star from a fake sport with real drug problems. As his nutritionist Dave Palumbo told Matt Rivera during a podcast several years ago: "The good thing about wrestling is that because it's not a professional sport per se, more entertainment, they are allowed to take hormone replacement. So they can go to HRT [hormone replacement therapy] places, they can get testosterone -- 100 mg a week, whatever they prescribe nowadays -- they can get HCG [Human Chorionic Gonadotropin], they can do HGH [human growth hormone] if they want. Those are acceptable, and a lot of the wrestlers do it."
But kids shouldn't. Nor should athletes. Such supplements are banned in sport by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Like so much of everything Trump does, however, reestablishing the old fitness test -- sit-ups, pull-ups, a mile run -- is about dismantling or dismissing something his Democratic predecessors did. It's about the president's preoccupation with what he thinks looks tough, his MAGA movement's imagining of masculinity, a Triple H, who retired from wrestling in 2022 after being frightened by an episode with heart failure.
World Wrestling Entertainment, headed by major Trump campaign financiers Vince and Linda McMahon, denied Palumbo's claim. Vince McMahon beat a 1993 criminal indictment, supported by testimony from a doctor who was convicted, that McMahon and his organization supplied steroids to its wrestlers. One was superstar Hulk Hogan, who died last month of a heart attack at 71.
Still, Trump invited faces from the troubled so-called sport of pro wrestling to stand with him before the public last week as imprimaturs of well-being, including Linda McMahon, rewarded a second time now for her largesse to the Trump campaign with a Cabinet appointment as Secretary of Education. Levesque is McMahon's son-in-law, too, and WWE's chief content officer.
Trump also invited Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, a registered sex offender who was arrested twice in the late '90s with crack cocaine, an addiction he admitted on "60 Minutes" to Mike Wallace. What kind of role models are these?
By contrast, President Barack Obama, who fought a smoking habit and installed a basketball court at the White House to feed his athletic habit, included Olympic medalists Dominique Dawes, Allyson Felix, and Michelle Kwan on what was his President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. It emphasized overall fitness that highlighted healthy eating. First lady Michelle Obama headed the effort that included a vegetable garden she planted and tended on the South Lawn with local kids. Trump during his first term infamously served a buffet of fast foods such as McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Domino's to visiting national champion college football teams.
Trump's approach to youth fitness is on-brand nostalgia, in the worst way. Like his administration's thwarting wind energy construction and electric vehicle manufacturing in lieu of boosting coal mining and building more combustion engine cars. It isn't helpful. It's hurtful. And it's narrow-minded by focusing on competition -- Trump placed "sports" before "fitness" in the program's title -- to ensure what the president fanaticized as "America's global dominance in sports."
Retired Spelman College president Beverly Tatum took an opposite approach when she led the all-women's HBCU in Atlanta for 13 years starting in 2002. In her soon-to-be-released book "Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times," Tatum recalled reading an article about the sedentary lives of young Black women and how it contributed to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, breast cancer and other health vagaries that plague Black women. So, she took the unpopular tact of shutting down the small school's intercollegiate athletic program in favor of a wellness initiative for the entire student body.
"The overall approach to wellness that we were implementing at Spelman was certainly very much in line with the activities of the Obama White House," Tatum, a psychologist by profession who wrote the noted book, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race," told me Wednesday. "And I say the Obama White House because Michelle Obama was one of the great champions of eating better and moving more. And our slogan was, 'Eat better. Move more. Sleep well.'
"If you've got those three things working, particularly for late adolescence -- improving your diet, engaging in regular activity, not only for better physical health, but also mental health, and then ... sleep," Tatum said she and the Spelmanites learned, "you are well on your way to a long and healthy life, which is of course what we wanted for our students."
Not some made-up machismo from the 1950s.