It’s well established that Donald Trump is not the sharpest tool in the shed. He doesn’t like reading—or facts. He cares more about being popular and adored as a public figure (heading rallies) than doing a good job as a public servant to the American people (i.e. attending intelligence briefings). But a new piece from Vox takes the horror of Trump as the “Leader of the Free World” to whole new depths.
Trump thinks exercise will kill you.
I wish I were joking. Remember when Trump was strangely evasive and secretive about sharing reports about his health while also attacking Hillary for being “medically unfit” to serve as president? It’s probably because he personally has a lot to hide, as the New Yorker points out.
There has been considerable speculation about Trump’s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. His personal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, issued brief, celebratory statements—Trump’s lab-test results were “astonishingly excellent”—mentioning little more than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin. Trump himself says that he is “not a big sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald’s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.
You read that right—Trump thinks that the human body is like a battery in one’s iPad or smartphone. Once it’s dead, it’s dead—and if people work out, every sweaty step on the treadmill takes them one step closer to their inevitable death.
This belief isn’t just absurd, it is ridiculously archaic as Vox explains:
There was a time when doctors would have concurred with Trump on this. That was the Victorian era. Back then, people worried a physical activity could cause everything from exhaustion and heart palpitations, particularly in women.
A century later, doctors’ thinking has moved on. Research now shows exercise is actually the closest thing we have to a miracle cure.
It’s easy to just laugh this off as a Trump-specific problem, but remember that Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. The GOP has made rejecting science a part of their platform—they’re huge climate change deniers and love to lie to women about abortion, after all.
Trump’s Victorian-era beliefs about exercise show the dangers of having a major political party normalize “alternative facts” about the human body and our environment. With beliefs that have yet to join the 21st century, it’s slightly less surprising that Trump would support something as cruel as the AHCA. How could we trust our president—someone who thinks exercise is bad for everyone—to support policies that’d actually improve the health and well-being of the American people?