Trump Won't Exercise For Fear Of Depleting His Body's Finite Store Of Energy

It’s not surprising that an artificially-hued, overweight 70-year-old with a terrifying lack of self-control and a noted penchant for fast food doesn’t hit the gym regularly. It somehow is surprising, though, that he has a characteristically smug and preposterous explanation.

Trump Revealed, a biography of the new president compiled by Washington Post reporters in the wake of the election, includes the almost laughable detail that Trump stopped working out because he thought

the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.

This fun lil’ toddler-level understanding of human physiology was brought to people’s attention again this week as an aside in an expansive New Yorker examining the likelihood that Trump will get fired. The bulk of the piece focuses on what it would take to get Trump impeached and whether we should start getting our hopes up about that, but first delves into the viability of invoking the 25th Amendment and ousting Trump on the basis of his mental or physical incapacity. In a description of his physical decrepitude—which, for these purposes, is basically beside the point considering we’re talking about someone who’s mental mush—the piece reminds us that, aside from golf, “he considers exercise misguided,” because of his Energizer Bunny biological theory.

The Washington Post inexplicably published a studied rebuttal of Trump’s beliefs yesterday, making salient arguments on the lines of pointing out that energy is only finite if you stop eating, which would kill you anyway. Studies, if you can imagine it, have actually shown that exercising is good.

In all here’s the problem, right? You can either engage with the sort of nonsensical whims that you wouldn’t humor coming from a small child or else ignore the best evidence of what the man with the nuclear codes is thinking. Donald Trump thinks moving drains his vital fluids; he cites self-serving pseudoscience to back his own laziness; and now the national papers are positing No, moving around is good as part of a two-sided debate in which one side has the White House to use as a megaphone. Whatever! Go run or swim or bike or lift or something later, or now.