The Constitution requires a president only to be 35 or older, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a natural-born citizen, but former President Donald Trump says voters should demand more.
Mr. Trump has proposed that candidates, particularly President Biden, undergo cognitive examinations and even drug testing.
Unable to fathom Mr. Biden’s well-received performance at the State of the Union address in March, Mr. Trump said at a recent campaign rally, “He was high as a kite.”
The demands are unorthodox for an unorthodox election featuring a pair of unpopular candidates.
“I feel like we are one press release away from this whole thing turning into Feats of Strength,” said J. Tucker Martin, a longtime Virginia political operative who served in the inner circle of Gov. Robert McDonnell. “Presidential campaigns won’t end until someone pins the incumbent.”
Mr. Biden has shown no indication that he will accept Mr. Trump’s demands, and Mr. Martin said the former president could face uneasy moments should other tests be added to the list. “Trump is in real danger with the ‘business ethics’ category,” Mr. Martin said.
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Mr. Trump’s demands, including a lie detector test to determine whether Mr. Biden is full of malarkey, are gamesmanship of the more extreme order.
Still, they play on voters’ long-running sense that they should demand more of their president than a 35-year-old body with a lucky birthplace.
In the nation’s early days, the belief was that voters should reward the most virtuous among their candidates, roughly equating to those best able to put the people’s needs above their own interests.
James Madison wrote that the “aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
Presidents also have undergone plenty of implicit tests.
Until President Kennedy, voters expected their president to be protestant. Until President Obama, voters expected their president to be White. To date, voters have expected their president to be a man.
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Military service has waxed and waned as an important test in voters’ minds.
A tax scandal involving President Nixon ushered in new expectations about presidential candidates’ willingness to be open about their finances. After that, all major political party nominees published their tax returns until Mr. Trump broke that unwritten rule in his 2016 run.
Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, said Mr. Trump announced that he was undergoing an audit and would release his returns when the audit was complete.
“Trump has never fulfilled this promise,” Mr. Lichtman said.
He said the expectation that the president’s doctor would release a summary of his annual physical has never included the type of cognitive test Mr. Trump demands of Mr. Biden.
“I am not surprised by anything that Trump does which violates norms or expectations. Clearly, he is trying to play on the false narrative that Biden lacks the mental capacity to serve again as president,” Mr. Lichtman said.
Larry Jacobs, an elections expert and professor at the University of Minnesota, said presidential expectations have changed as Americans demand more personal exposure to the candidates.
“Many didn’t know that FDR was paralyzed because they saw him seated and there were few images of him with crutches or in a wheelchair,” Mr. Jacobs said. “JFK had debilitating back pain that required injections and the press didn’t cover.
“Expectations about mental acuity is a more recent phenomenon,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, and his family probably governed for him at the end. We only found out about this later — much later through historical research.”
That started to change in the early 1970s.
George McGovern’s running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was forced to step aside after it was revealed that he suffered from bouts of depression that led to hospitalizations.
Mr. Trump isn’t the first candidate to tell voters how to assess presidents.
When Democrats tried to make President Reagan’s age an issue for voters in the 1984 campaign, Reagan famously defused the “age issue” by saying during a debate that he wouldn’t use “my opponent’s youth and inexperience” against him.
Reagan won reelection in a landslide.
Democrats this year have urged voters to impose an insurrection test on the candidates and say Mr. Trump’s behavior surrounding the 2020 election should be disqualifying.
They argue that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment requires it.
Courts have grappled with the issue. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the ballot.
The Supreme Court ducked the big question about insurrection but said the states can’t keep a presidential candidate off their ballots by citing the insurrection issue.
Experts said Mr. Trump’s demands for Mr. Biden lack those sorts of lofty constitutional questions.
“Ah, testing for competency! Or is it raising doubt about Biden’s?! Yes, it is!” Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University, said in an email. “But there’s nothing ‘sinister’ here. Innuendo about your opponent’s lack of qualifications is a necessary tool of successful politics.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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