In late February, timed to coincide with the Olympics, Trump rolled out the executive order that renamed the President’s Council by flipping the words “Physical Fitness” and “Sports.” Accompanying this change was an opinion piece by Ivanka Trump for NBC News, which focused on the importance of every American child having the opportunity to pursue their athletic dreams. She pointed out that team sports are too expensive for many children, and said the Trump Department of Health and Human Services was looking into ways of fixing this. It is unclear what solutions she or the president imagine, or what all the implications will be.
At present, they have only recently staffed the council, and there is no one listed on the Advisory Council for Trump’s President’s Council of Sports, Physical Fitness, and Nutrition. Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a former member of the Advisory Council, tweeted as much in response to Ivanka Trump’s purported concern about American physical fitness. While Trump’s executive order formally ended the (already defunct) Let’s Move initiative, the nutrition policy from the Obama era was not housed in the Council. Those battles are being fought separately, and this executive order does not change nutrition labeling or calorie counts.
Most of the conservative commentary has implied the point of the move was just to illustrate the Trump Administration’s different plans for fitness — namely, less interventionist government. While the reality is school lunch changes and nutrition guidelines were not actually coming out of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition, the desire to pick a different organizational name than the one Obama chose is pointed. Even if this is the main goal, there is something notably different about emphasizing sports over emphasizing fitness.
In a 2010 interview about the council, Michelle Obama said that “not every kid is an athlete and they don’t have to be…because you can get the exercise you need from walking your dog vigorously, running with your dog, doing some push-ups at home or just playing.” The emphasis on youth sports comes from a different place. It draws on conservative anxieties about “participation trophies,” and the importance of learning how to compete and win in a capitalist society.