How Trump’s Obsession With Weight Explains His Misrule

When President Donald Trump addressed Army troops June 10 at Fort Bragg, his audience was screened for political leanings and physical appearance. “No fat soldiers,” read one unit-level message, according to Konstantin Toropin and Steve Beynon of Military.com. Another memo, reported by the NBC affiliate in Raleigh, said “soldiers sitting in the bleachers are to be fit and not look fat.” It’s inconceivable that these directives originated anywhere but the White House.

This presidential aversion isn’t new. “Trump has a long record, which he lengthens every day, of disparaging people for what he regards as excess pounds,” the Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman noted in October 2016. But fat-shaming is more than one of Trump’s many deeply offensive habits. It’s also a metaphor that Trump misapplies to the federal government he’s supposed to manage.

“Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people,” a Trump Organization vice president once told a caterer at his golf club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. When Trump owned the Miss Universe Organization, he humiliated one winner by publicly calling her “an eating machine” and, unbeknownst to her, invited the press to watch her work out at a gym. Trump said that Rosie O’Donnell had a “fat, ugly face” (he also called her a “pig”) and that Kim Kardashian had a “fat ass” (he also said she had a “bad body”).

These comments reflect Trump’s well-documented mistreatment of women, but Trump often insults men for their weight, too. When Trump was a real estate developer he routinely referred to one New York City official behind his back as “the fat fuck,” according to a former Trump Organization executive. During the 2016 campaign he repeatedly mocked his opponent Chris Christie for his weight, once pointing to Christie and saying, “You’re not eating Oreos anymore. No more Oreos.” In August 2024, Trump said of the Democratic Montana Senator Jon Tester (who lost that year): “He’s got the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen.” Trump even mocked one of his own supporters at an August 2019 rally, saying, “That guy’s got a serious weight problem. Go home, start exercising!”