Four-Times-Indicted Donald Trump Is Still Lying About, of All Things, His Weight

Donald Trump’s booking documents in Fulton County, Georgia, manage to repeat a familiar untruth about the former president—and even establish a brand-new one. Once again, Trump, whose height peaked at 6’2”, claims to be 6’3”. He’s been doing this for years, even though, as a 77-year-old man, he has surely been shrinking, not growing, and frankly isn’t particularly likely to be 6’2” still.

But Donald Trump’s booking documents also note Trump’s weight, pre-supplied by Trump himself: 215 pounds.

Six-three and 215! Those are some impressive stats. Those are “Muhammad Ali in his prime” numbers. As one point of comparison, Trump’s doctor had him at 239 in 2018 (and it’s this guy, so, grain of salt). As another point of comparison, I am 5’9”, and I would say my body shape is comparable to Trump’s. I weigh, like, 240. And I play soccer sometimes, unlike Trump, who never exercises because he believes that his body contains a finite amount of energy, like a battery.

Donald Trump, of course, lies about basically everything. It’s his comfort zone. The mug shot itself is a kind of lie, or at least a very rehearsed performance, one for which he’s surely been preparing for weeks. Where his alleged co-conspirators displayed varying levels of shock, despair, and derangement, Trump glowered at the camera, creating an indelible photo. His allies are already making great use of it. “It will be a more popular image than the Mona Lisa,” Laura Loomer told Reuters. Want a beer koozie with the mug shot on it? That’ll be $15 for a set of two, paid to the Trump campaign.

It is a little funny, at least, that at a jailhouse booking, a place where your privacy is sacrificed on an altar for the public good, where you’re branded with the mug shot that will follow you for life, you are nonetheless allowed to declare your own weight. Yes, you are being thrown into a cell, but if you’ve always wanted to be a buck-eighty, well, now’s your chance. Officer, I didn’t kill that man—and I’m a Size 4.

Ostensibly, the mug shot and other identifying information are released so that if you wiggle free from the system, you’ll be easier to recognize and capture. That’s patently absurd in this instance; no highway patrolman will fail to identify a bail-jumping Donald Trump, but more particularly, no patrolman will let him go because they believed the former president to be 6’3”. (That’s why the other three jurisdictions where he’s been indicted dispensed with the mug shot rigmarole entirely.) So it’s hard, in this case, to get too outraged at Donald Trump’s extremely obvious fibs. Who among us, still burdened by outdated, damaging body-image issues, might not seize the opportunity to put into the public record our target weight, rather than the inconvenient number that just happens to appear on the scale this week?

One of the great annoyances of the Donald Trump era is that for all his evil, all his cruelty, all his shitheadedness, the guy is still, somehow, a little relatable. I’ve got a whole box of shirts in my basement I intend to wear once I definitely, eventually, get down to 215. Maybe Donald Trump does too. Or maybe he’ll be getting a new supply in orange—just a tiny bit snug.