Instead of focusing on the president’s struggle to descend a ramp, voters should look at his performance in office.
Everyone’s feeling a little frayed these days, but even by those standards, President Donald Trump seemed a little off on Saturday, as he delivered the commencement speech at West Point.
The speech was supposed to be a triumphant moment for Trump—he’d insisted on calling cadets back to the United States Military Academy, after they were sent home amid the coronavirus pandemic—but instead it raised questions about his physical fitness. The president seemed to struggle to drink out of a glass of water, then faltered while walking down a ramp from the dais.
Clips of the two moments circulated over the weekend—especially after Trump himself tweeted about his walk down the ramp, insisting that he was fine—raising questions about his fitness for office. But these questions, and the largely baseless theories to explain his behavior, seem to miss the point. Whether or not Trump can walk smoothly down a ramp says nothing about his ability to serve as president. The search for some sort of disqualifying physical ailment is a distraction. Trump has offered ample evidence to judge his dubious fitness for office over the past three years, regardless of how he sips water.
Trump himself is to blame for some of the spread of the clips. The mainstream press typically shies away from these stories, unsure of how to cover odd moments like this in the absence of a clear pattern or a medical diagnosis. Often that means reporters just look away. (Consider the case of Ronald Reagan, whom many reporters understood to be declining in his second term, but whose symptoms went largely uncovered; he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, five years after he left office.) But Trump fell victim to the Streisand effect, the principle that trying to debunk a negative story just brings more attention to it.
