Is Trump's weight a legitimate campaign issue?
Physical and mental health is, for lack of a better term, bipartisan. Both Mitch McConnell and Dianne Feinstein have has well-publicized “episodes.”
Is Donald Trump’s obesity a legitimate campaign issue? I ask because less than 24 hours ago “fat pig” was trending on Twitter because, basically, Trump fat shamed Chris Christie at a ‘24 campaign rally in New Hampshire. “Christie – he's eating right now. He can't be bothered," Trump said during that speech. Then Trump elevated a rally goer’s boorish shout of “fat pig,” bringing it onto the Presidential campaign stage, rhetorically, for use as a punchline. As Brandon Gillespie describes it on Fox News online:
"Don't call him a fat pig. You can't do it. You can't do that. So now, because you're not allowed to do that, and, therefore, we're not going to do it, OK? We want to be very civil, right?" Trump said as he chuckled.
Trump's comments were just the latest instance of his poking fun at Christie's weight, something he's done on multiple occasions in the past.
Charmed, I’m sure. However much as I would prefer to write about Niger or Wagner Group or even the horror of summer shark attacks, it is a legitimate question to be asked, namely — Is Trump’s weight a campaign issue? Though, perhaps instead of framing things as a matter of one’s weight — an issue that is fraught, clearly — we should talk about it in terms of physical and mental health. In the last few months, especially in the United States Senate, the issue of age, particularly through the prism of mental and physical health, has come up, harshly. Physical and mental health is, for lack of a better term, bipartisan. We are all — Democrats and Republicans — one day closer to our last. Both Mitch McConnell and Dianne Feinstein have has well-publicized “episodes,” revealing that Death has no political preference (though one side, eschewing masks, did worse during COVID’s height). It seems to me, though, that constituents of elderly politicians deserve a full reckoning as to their representative’s fitness for office.
It is a legitimate question, if not an issue, for several reasons in a Presidential race. One, President Biden himself acknowledges that physical and mental vigor — age, quite frankly — is a legitimate subject of voter inquiry. And if Biden, at 80, believes that his campaign must make the argument to voters that he is indeed fit for a second term, then why not pose the same question of Trump, at age 77? If not, I want it explained why those three years of difference in age magically absolve Trump.
Second, Trump has not the best of eating habits. He is unnaturally absorbed by ketchups and sauces; meats well-done and ice cream upon cakes, stacked. In essence, he eats like a child, but has serious cholesterol issues, to boot. His standard order of McDonalds, during the 2016 campaign, involved 2400 calories and 100 grams of fat, though he “never ate the bread,” so there’s that. But at 74, Trump favored double helpings of sauces (always sauces), ice cream with his chocolate cream pie and well-done beefs. That was when he was in the public eye. It is hard to imagine that, at 77, he has improved what he eats. And all of this despite the fact that we know that Trump has mild heart disease as well as that he is taking a statin drug to lower his cholesterol. He listens to no one; not his daughter, not his doctors. Voters have a right to know his relative health vis-a-vis his weight, in order to factor that into their decision-making process — particularly in the primaries!
And third, Trump, who suffered from COVID in October 2020, was much sicker than his administration led on. “While Mr. Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed, his medical team sought to downplay the severity of the situation, saying that he was on an upswing,” the New York Times reported. “At 74 and overweight, he was at risk for severe disease, and was prescribed an aggressive course of treatments.” How much more at risk is he of extremely depressed blood oxygen levels if he were to get a second case of coronavirus, at 77, and even more obese than last time?
Before his arraignment in April, Trump told the police he was 6’2 and 240 pounds. Assuming that he is not a liar in this particular instance, that puts him firmly within the category of obese, a condition he has been in, officially, since at least 2015. As he approaches age 80, shouldn’t he have to answer after his health to voters? Shouldn’t all politicians after the full retirement age? Especially if he is going into a head-to-head contest with an incumbent who has already agreed to address issues of physical and mental health? If Trump were to win, he would be 78 years old at the start and 82 by the end of his second term, older — dare we say it? — that President Biden is now.
Finally, it is indeed curious that the question of weight and health on the Republican side of the aisle involves both Trump and Chris Christie. And, of course, its personal. A blood feud. For besides the familial blood ties — Jared, whose father Christie prosecuted of “loathesome, disgusting crimes,” is Trump’s son-in-law. There is also the simple, primitive act of the transmission of COVID. To be exact, Trump gave Christie COVID by not telling him he had tested positive, as they did debate prep in 2021. And as a result, Christie, himself obese, spent 7 days in the ICU. There he had time to think, one imagines, of devastatingly revengeful things. So here we are now.
I wrote of Christie’s ancient blood feud with the “Trump mafia syndicate” in June:
Chris Christie is in this for one simple reason — to destroy Donald Trump. He has that lane all to himself, and will probably take out all his frustrations at Jared out on the candidate as well. I have described it as a “kamikaze” campaign and I’m sticking with that description. Christie’s plan is to skewer Trump on the debate stage the same way he skewered Marco Rubio and, absent that, slowly obliterate the former President by a sustained and brutal series of attacks all summer and until he runs out of what few billionaire donors he has left.
So far that prediction holds. President Biden must be chuckling to himself while eating unsalted popcorn, watching his opponents bury each other in containers of lard.
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So good