WHAT the scales show when Donald Trump steps on them isn’t necessarily the same as what the world sees.
Trump’s weight, along with that of Boris Johnson, is a political as well as a personal matter; what you or I weigh is purely personal, although dear family members might notice or pass comment.
According to the delayed release of his medical report, Trump pushes the needle to 244 pounds.
The report was due out in April but has only just been released. You do wonder if Trump, ranting about lamestream doctors and fake medical news, sent it back until his doctor came up with something less embarrassing.
According to the report, the 73-year-old president weighs one pound more than a year ago; and if you believe that, you’ll swallow anything, including that hydroxychloroquine Trump took to ward off Covid-19.
According to his slick-note, Trump took the anti-malaria drug “safely and without side effects”. Unless, that is, one of the side effects is the spouting of inflammatory nonsense and hijacking bibles.
Trump’s weight and health are political in that they frame his literal fitness for office; his mental fitness for office cannot really be measured, although we can gauge that for ourselves.
One side effect of this delayed medical report can be found on Twitter, where people are having fun mocking the medical. Some tweets show Trump, who claims to be six-ft-three, standing next to Barack Obama, who happily owns up to six-ft-one, and they appear to be the same height. That suggests Trump’s height/weight ratio isn’t correct – even if you accept the given weight.
Other tweeters put pictures of muscled baseball players and the like who are the “same” height and weight next to photos of Humpty-Dumpty Trump on the links, golfing trousers pulled up tight over his round belly.
We should try to steer clear of anything close to fat-shaming, as plenty of people are unhappy about their weight; but at least they tell self-deceiving fibs about what they’ve eaten that week, rather than get a White House doctor to tell weighty fibs on their behalf.
If we accept that Trump is the height he pretends to be, his numbers suggest a BMI of 30.5, “which is technically obese”, according to the Daily Mail.
Those 244 pounds convert to nearly 17-and-a-half stone, and here’s a funny thing. According to a report in the Sun on May 15, Trump and Boris Johnson weigh the same, but Johnson is only 5ft 9inches tall.
Pulling myself to the full to 5ft 8inches, I’ll happily swear that just looking at Trump and Johnson tells you they can’t possibly weigh the same. One of them is telling whoppers and on this occasion it isn’t Johnson.
The prime minister is said to worry about his weight, believing that he was more badly hit by Covid-19 than “thinnies” like Matt Hancock, according to the Times of May 14.
Johnson is said to have lost a stone since being ill, but that would still leave him with a BMI of around 34 – with anything above 30 being regarded as obese.
According again to the Sun, the “NHS says that a man his age and height should be aiming to weigh between 8st 13lb and 12st 1lb”. As someone one inch shorter and a few years older, I weigh a little under 12 stone – which is too much, but that stomach has a mind of its own (is it lunchtime yet?).
Johnson decided to launch a ‘war’ on obesity after returning to work, perhaps to distract us from his government’s failings over Covid-19. Whatever, it was a typical bit of solipsism, in that he only sees the problem because he’s suffering from it.
But the one good thing you can say about Boris Johnson is that at least he isn’t Donald Trump.