Unfit for Humanity
How can satire satirize itself? The White House’s announcement that Donald Trump wants to reinstate the Presidential Fitness Test for youth may be one of the most inadvertently hilarious moments in American political life—a moment so ripe for ridicule it arrives overripe, pre-rotted on the vine. That a man so notoriously obese, sedentary, gluttonous, and morally bankrupt is proposing a national youth fitness initiative defies not only irony, but basic decency. Donald Trump, who treats vegetables like foreign enemies and considers golf cart rides a workout, is now calling on schoolchildren to demonstrate physical fitness. The absurdity is Olympian. Trump’s glaring physical unfitness, his fast food fealty, and open contempt for exercise—combined with a rap sheet of personal, legal, and ethical failings—utterly disqualify him from preaching discipline to anyone, let alone to children. As with so many of his public pronouncements, this one reads more like projection than policy. Trump’s endless stream of accusations toward others are, more often than not, inadvertent confessions. His sudden interest in fitness betrays an awareness of his own epic unfitness—not just physically, but for the presidency itself. Trump is the antithesis of fitness—in body, in character, in spirit. That he would demand of children what he could never demand of himself is not just laughable; it’s grotesque.
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