Hidden message behind Trump's 'hot-or-not' test for kids leaves analyst alarmed

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have announced their plans to reinstate the presidential fitness test in schools, an archaic exercise regimen dating back to the 1950s that has been widely discredited as a measure of health.

The reason for doing this has uniquely dark motivations, Amanda Marcotte argued for Salon on Tuesday.

"Over the decades since the presidential fitness test was first implemented ... health experts increasingly criticized it for not only being ineffective, but also counterproductive," wrote Marcotte who, in her own reckoning, is fairly active and healthy but constantly failed the test in school due to her asthma.

"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."

Trump and Kennedy, however, don't really care about this, Marcotte argued, because in their minds, physical fitness is tied to feats of strength and even just physical appearance. "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.'"

The problem, she wrote, is Kennedy believes if only Americans are slim and physically fit, they have no need for modern health care, like the medicines and vaccines he constantly invents conspiracy theories about — and that Americans' use of the health care system, especially programs for lower-income individuals like Medicaid, is a moral failing that must be corrected.

This is exemplified by Kennedy's speech last week, she wrote, in which he said: “I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. 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.”

Americans do suffer from lifestyle-related health problems, chiefly obesity, Marcotte wrote — but fixing that isn't the goal. After all, "the Trump administration has decimated programs to improve access to healthy foods, while rolling back regulations that reduce pollution." Instead, they are "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 is the real, dark purpose of Trump and Kennedy bringing back the old presidential fitness test, Marcotte concluded, and the purpose of their Make America Healthy Again drive in general: "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,'" she wrote. "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."