The New Republic reports President Donald Trump screened Army troops attending his June 10 address at Fort Bragg for body weight in addition to political leanings.
“No fat soldiers,” read one unit-level message, according to Military.com. Another memo, reported by an NBC affiliate in Raleigh, said “soldiers sitting in the bleachers are to be fit and not look fat.” Mother Jones writer and author Timothy Noah says it’s unlikely these directives originated anywhere but the White House, and it fits the narrative of a man who makes a habit of fat-shaming both men and women.
“Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people,” a Trump Organization vice president told a caterer at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf club in California. And when Trump owned the Miss Universe Organization, he humiliated one winner by publicly calling her “an eating machine”. He said actress and comedian Rosie O’Donnell had a “fat, ugly face,” and called her a “pig”. He’s been just as critical of former political opponent Chris Christie, Democratic Montana Senator Jon Tester and even his own supporters.
This is classic narcissistic projection, says Noah, and Trump applies it to more than just weight.
“Trump is a crook (a convicted felon, in fact), so he calls other people crooks,” Noah writes. “He’s a liar (The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 whoppers during his first term alone), so he calls other people liars (even a Gold Star widow!). He’s an ignoramus so he calls other people stupid. Trump’s obsession with other people’s weight is another manifestation: He’s an overweight man who calls other people (less politely) overweight.
However, Trump is applying his obsession with weight to the federal workforce when he calls it “bloated, fat, and disgusting,” and this is aggravating his “misrule.”
The federal workforce was not, in fact, bloated, fat, and disgusting when Trump arrived in Washington, says Noah. and it certainly isn’t now.
“The feds employ about two million civilians. How many civilians did they employ in 1953? About two million. How many in 1963? About two million. How many in 1973? About two million. How many in 1983? About two million,” he said, while adding that since 1953, the United States population has more than doubled, “so the number of civilian federal employees available to serve each of us has shrunk more than one half.”
Yet Trump and the House approved funding cuts that would decimate federal agencies and potentially cut roughly 12 percent of the federal workforce while adding trillions in deficit spending that Noah considers legitimate bloat of the worst kind.
It’s a huge amount of swagger for a president with a claimed weight of 224 pounds and a body mass index (BMI) of 28—which Noah suspects is a lowball. Even at that professed weight, Trump is the “sixth-most-overweight president in American history.”
Read the full New Republic report at this link.