The president’s lack of a rigorous fitness regimen could be surmised from his fast-food diet, from what is politely called his “body type” and from the fact that his only physical exertion seems to be twisting in the wind. But multiple reports say he actively believes exercise can be fatal.
This was first reported by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in their 2016 book “Trump Revealed.”
“After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted,” they wrote. “Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, ‘You are going to die young because of this.'”
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Although the president plays a prodigious amount of golf, its cardiovascular benefits are minimal. Not a problem; Trump considers standing to be cardio. Vox quotes the New York Times in 2015: “Trump said he was not following any special diet or exercise regimen for the campaign. ‘All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster,’ he said. He exerts himself fully by standing in front of an audience for an hour, as he just did. ‘That’s exercise.’”
It’s unclear whether Trump’s personal physician — the one who wrote an assessment that Trump “unequivocally” would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” in five minutes — shares this belief.
But Vox points out that most doctors once agreed with Trump — in the Victorian era.
