The Presidential Fitness Challenge

As the anniversary of his inauguration nears, a new book filled with salacious claims about the Trump administration has become a bestseller. Faced with renewed questions about his mental and temperamental fitness for the office, President Trump has pushed back, declaring himself a “very stable genius” and attacking his critics.

But no new claims or revelations, James Fallows wrote recently for The Atlantic, have been more telling than Trump's public behavior. If the stories presented in a book about the president constitute a scandal, Fallows asks, what does it mean that the scandal continues in public view? What dangers are courted by speculating about the president's mental acuity? What steps could be taken to make such speculation unnecessary? Fallows joins our hosts to discuss.

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Links

- “It's Been an Open Secret All Along” (James Fallows, January 4, 2018)

- ”Is Something Neurologically Wrong With Donald Trump?” (James Hamblin, January 3, 2018)

- “The Case for Hillary Clinton and Against Donald Trump” (The Editors, November 2016 Issue)

- “A Time Capsule of the Unpresidential Things Trump Says” (James Fallows, May 23, 2016, to November 20, 2016)

- Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Justin Frank, 2004)

- “John Dean: Nixon ‘Might Have Survived If There’d Been a Fox News’” (Edward-Isaac Dovere, POLITICO Magazine, January 02, 2018)

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