The Presidential Fitness Test: Weight, Age, and Masculinity in Election 2020

• In Event: Presidential Elections

Abstract

Whether it be the concealment of Roosevelt’s paralysis, Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, or Reagan’s dementia, an interest and investment in the commander in chief’s health is not new. However, several demographic, cultural, and technological developments have increased demand for a performance of a robust physical and mental wellness. With an aging population, the election of 2020 saw the two oldest candidates in history vying for the job, with Joe Biden at 78 years old and Donald Trump at 74, with all indication that these two will be their party’s nominee in 2024 at the age of 82 and 78 respectively. While these men are perhaps the last of the baby boomer presidents, their campaigns must operate in a communications landscape dominated by social media and a significantly divided electorate. Both have navigated ableist critiques from the pundit class as well as, perhaps most vocally, the supporters of their opponent. Significantly, all of this happened with a backdrop of a global pandemic that proved most deadly for the aged, obese, and infirm.

Though both Biden and Trump were subject to this scrutiny and derision, Trump displayed the same kinds of tactics against his primary and general election opponents in 2016, most viscously against Hillary Clinton. After a diagnosis of pneumonia and a loss of consciousness at an event, Trump declared at a debate, “She doesn’t have the stamina” to be president. As Conroy and Neville-Shepard and Jaclyn Nolan detail, the rhetoric around Clinton’s health was anchored in misogyny and stereotypes about women’s fitness for leadership. I argue that perceptions about presidential health are inherently gendered, with masculine performance anchored in physical fitness and its concomitant autonomy required for executive leadership.

This project applies a gender lens to discourse surrounding the advanced age of those contending for the presidency in 2020, incumbent Trump’s physicality, including social media memes and other renderings of Trump as a hyper-masculinized muscle man as well as communications produced by his administration before and during the president’s battle with Covid-19 in October 2020. I also consider Biden’s campaign and supporters efforts to demonstrate his own physical abilities throughout the campaign. Finally, I discuss what this insistence on wellness and performance of health means for those candidates that fall short of these demands for masculine physical prowess and whether this has become more prominent in the wake of the selection of the first woman vice-president Kamala Harris.

Author

• Aidan Smith, Tulane University