What in Fat-Hating Hell Is This?

[Content Note: Body policing; fat hatred.]

The very last thing I want to be obliged to do is defend Donald fucking Trump in any way, but Ben Strauss at Politico has written a truly contemptible piece of vile fat-hating, body policing, and health auditing about Trump, so here we are.

There is a lot wrong with this piece, and I could spend the next three hours or so of my life deconstructing the many, many problems with it, but instead I will simply highlight one sentence, which is the attempt to justify the existence of a nearly 3,000-word article about how Donald Trump is fat and doesn't exercise: "All this scrutiny might seem like body shaming if it weren't for Trump's own obsession with appearances."

NOPE. All that scrutiny is still actually body shaming. That Trump does it to other people doesn't neutralize it when it gets done to him. That's not how it works.

There is no excuse — none — for publishing this lengthy exercise in fat hatred, the entirety of which is basically the equivalent of a Disney film using fat as shorthand to convey that a character is evil.

Trump is incompetent, cruel, vainglorious, ethically bankrupt, intellectually lazy, morally repugnant, disloyal, nepotistic, avaristic, egomaniacal, insecure, impulsive, and corrupt, and not a single one of those character traits is unique to fat people — even though fat is frequently used to indicate precisely these moral failings, in pop culture and literature dating back hundreds of years.

On my long list of concerns about Donald Trump, what he looks like doesn't make the cut.

And suffice it to say I am not fooled by fat hatred masquerading as concerns about his health, under the auspices that the United States President owes healthfulness to the nation he petitioned to serve.

Finally, as a fat person who spends her days documenting and protesting and resisting every single abusive thing Trump is doing, I take strong issue with the implication that fatness is an indication of low moral character.

If someone is fat, here is what that can tell you about them in total: They are fat.

The end.