Stop Talking About Donald Trump’s Body by Eimhear O’Toole
I’ll start with the obvious: Donald Trump is disgusting. He’s appalling. He epitomises everything that is wrong with America – nay, the world – and he does so proudly, and deliberately. He’s currently attempting a coup during election week in his own country. He mimicked a disabled reporter. He boasts about sexual assault. He put asylum-seeking toddlers in literal cages. He denies climate change and curtails reproductive rights. He caused a quarter of a million of his own citizens to die within six months, then told the rest not to worry about covid – after a drive-by from the comfort of his hermetically sealed car, and after announcing his intention to reduce access to affordable healthcare. He’s a racist, a white supremacist, a sexist – all the ‘ists’. He’s a liar, he’s incompetent, and he’s corrupt.
Donald Trump is none of these things because of his weight.
Let’s back up to the early hours of this morning, on day four thousand and twelve of rolling Presidential election news coverage. As all of us on the far side of the pond watched, with sandpaper-dry eyes and a freshly vested interest in the state of Nevada, CNN’s Anderson Cooper delivered his verdict on Trump’s car-crash press conference, and likened the President to ‘an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realising his time is over’.
Twitter, of course, lost its collective shit. ‘ANDERSON FOR PRESIDENT’, it bellowed – because apparently that’s Americans’ answer to everything. ‘Yessss Anderson!’. ‘Loved him before but love him even more now’. ‘Pure POETRY’. ‘This has saved 2020’. ‘What a gem!’. Tweeters put him on a par with CNN’s mile-a-minute election genius, John King – as though taking the piss out of a fat man for his weight were impressive, or revolutionary, or clever.
It really isn’t.
First and foremost, the unnecessary nature of Cooper’s comment is, perhaps, the most jarring part. The image of a turtle stuck on its back is already an idiom, and a pretty well-known one, at that. There was simply no need to crowbar in the word ‘obese’. A turtle on its back – especially one that’s ‘flailing in the hot sun’, if we insist on embellishing the phrase – is slow, incompetent, uncomfortable, awkward. It’s laughable: it’s pathetic.
Adding the redundant and pathologised intensifier of ‘obese’ does nothing but imbue fat bodies with similar qualities of incompetence and ungainliness. If this was deliberate on Cooper’s part, then it’s a calculated swipe at fat bodies and their inherent uselessness; if it was off-the-cuff, then it betrays an automatic, knee-jerk contempt for fat people. Which option is better?
Of course, the ‘obese turtle’ remark isn’t the first time Trump has been derided for his body. It’s happened again and again, throughout the four treacle-slow years he’s spent polluting our collective psyche. Watching people slag him off over his weight – instead of, like, his policies – is really fucking old by now, but still no less hurtful. It’s a unique type of pain, scrolling through your social media timeline with a clenched everything and making a mental note of which of the people you love or admire are taking delight in fat jokes.
Each time, you take stock: there’s the columnist whose articles I’ve bookmarked for years, the author whose novels I pre-order, a close friend’s boyfriend. Each one feels like a tiny bereavement, every time you watch them virtually guffaw at body-shaming. You realise that they all think the same thing about fat people – or, more to the point, that they don’t think at all. They just know, automatically, that being fat is shameful, and worthy of derision. It makes you paranoid. Is that what they think when they look at you?
The most baffling part of all is watching commentators go to great pains to explain exactly why, in pointing out Trump’s girth, they are performing a public service. But Trump fat-shamed Alicia Machado!, they cry. He lies about his own weight! He needs a taste of his own medicine! We need to call out his hypocrisy! Hit him where it hurts! In other words, let us have this cheap shot.
People maintain that mocking Trump’s body isn’t bad, because it’s ‘punching up’. They say he’s a bully who needs taken down a peg or two, as he’s arrogant enough to believe that he himself is a perfect physical specimen – the subtext being ‘He’s fucking deluded if he thinks he’s perfect. He’s fat’. They insist, ‘Don’t take it so seriously! It’s just an extra thing we can insult him for, because he’s a loser and a horrible person’. Whether they realise it or not, they are saying, He’s a loser and a horrible person – with the physique to match.
Making jokes about Trump’s fatness is not heroic, or a public service which will electric shock him into displaying a shred of decency. Donald Trump is a man who has such gall and so little common sense that he argues with epidemiologists over whether coronavirus exists. He is clearly deficient in empathy and compassion. He will not change his mind on climate change because Katie from Belfast shared fatphobic memes with her 67 followers.
If body-shaming had the power to make him show contrition for his horrific actions and words, then the years-old #MarALardAss hashtag would have freed ICE detainees by now. 2016’s ‘The Emperor Has No Balls’ sculpture series, depicting Trump with a sagging gut and a micropenis, would have prevented him from becoming the poster boy for QAnon. Have recycled electoral college gags claiming that ‘the only way Trump can get 270 is by losing 50lbs’ stopped him from pardoning rapists, or whipping up anti-Muslim rhetoric? No.
Maybe cheap jibes at an authoritarian, dangerous man who has caused unprecedented hurt do help people feel better for a split second. Maybe it allows them a semblance of control, and the illusion of the upper hand, given how vain a man Trump is known to be.
But Trump, and his body, do not exist in a vacuum. He will not see your memes and jokes (‘cause he’s busy staging that coup we talked about). You know who will see them? Your fat friends and relatives. They will see you laughing about how bodies that look like theirs are disgusting. Reading or hearing your words will hurt them. It takes a split second for you to make a fatphobic comment, to retweet a bitchy joke about chubsters, to screenshot memes to the group captioned with cry-laughing emojis. Then you can forget about them.
I can guarantee you, the fat people in your life will not forget.
The fat people reading your words will spend the rest of the day – at the very least – wondering if that’s what you think of their body, too. We see your posts and they remind us that if you didn’t know us as people – if we hadn’t proven our humanity and decency to you by dint of our personalities – then that’s what you’d be thinking of us when you walked by us in the street.
Laughing at Trump’s weight is not punching up. It is punching down to the fat people you know and love, and those that you don’t. Today, there will be kids in socially distanced playgrounds whose classmates will call them big fat turtles, because they heard their parents chortle about Cooper’s dig during the car ride to school.
Is this constructive, or brave? Is your five-second dopamine hit from your meme getting reposted or your tweet going viral worth the sadness, discrimination and pain which your words perpetuate?
Unsurprisingly, people who derive satisfaction or joy from ridiculing Trump’s body have their blinkers on when it comes to the lived realities of fatness. They argue that we need to ‘contextualise’ jokes about his appearance, and juxtapose them with his terrible words and deeds. But, for fat people, those jibes are already contextualised – as are fat bodies. Our context is the unrelentingly fatphobic society in which we live: we cannot escape the context if we try.
Seeing Trump be decried for his terrible behaviour and his body in the same breath – he’s awful, he’s racist, he’s a monster! And the cherry on the top of it all: he’s FAT! - creates a false equivalency, inextricably linking his size to his most despicable actions. Physiognomy, or using the body as an indicator of moral character, is a medieval practice. Why are we still doing it today?
Whatever mental and verbal gymnastics ostensibly liberal people perform in order to justify their fatphobia, it all comes down to this: laughing at someone for their physical appearance is shitty. It doesn’t matter if the object of your cruelty is Donald Trump. Yes, he’s a reprehensible excuse for a human being – but he is not reprehensible because he’s fat. His body is, in fact, probably the least offensive thing about him, yet I’m yet to see people summon half the vim when decrying him as a dictator as they muster when mocking him for his size.
But I’ll not hold my breath. Because this latest, last-minute wave of fatphobia towards Trump reiterates what fat people already know: shaming someone because of their weight is still the ‘Gotcha!’ moment. It ends arguments. It’s the trump card. When people, be they plebs or public figures, who would – rightly – never stand for transphobia, homophobia, racism or sexism mock Trump for his size, they are shaming everyone who shares those physical characteristics. In a world of #BeKind, where we’re obsessed with the effects of shame, cyberbullying, and othering, fatphobia is still a free-for-all.
Ironically, people who demonise Trump for his weight instead of his policies - especially left-leaning, pro-Democrat, progressive, liberal, self-professed allies who care enough to sit in front of the TV until 5am, willing the bastard to lose the swing states – could do with taking a long hard look in the mirror. Because fatphobia, even if it’s ‘just’ a throwaway joke on the internet, is lazy and unoriginal. It’s historically rooted in racism. It’s ableist, classist, and disproportionately affects and hurts minorities. Who else do we know that proudly displays all those qualities, like bumper stickers on the back of his shell?
Words by Eimhear O’Toole, you can follow them on Instagram here.
Image via Donald Trump’s Twitter account, you shouldn’t follow him.
