July 2, 2020

The Trump Files: Donald Thinks Exercising Might Kill You

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 5, 2016.

With Donald Trump’s nonexistent exercise regime getting some attention from Dr. Oz, it seems like a good time to point out one of the GOP nominee’s more unusual healthcare beliefs. The Washington Post‘s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher wrote in their new book, Trump Revealed, that Trump thought exercise permanently sapped him of energy.

After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. 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.”

Trump is still an avid golfer, though—and allegedly an equally avid cheater on the links. “When it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of one to 10,” sports columnist Rick Reilly told the Post last year.

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