The New Yorker:

Donald Trump, according to the results of his recent physical, which was conducted by Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician, is six feet three inches tall and weighs two hundred and thirty-nine pounds. That puts him, based on body-mass index, just a tenth of a point shy of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers “obese,” making him, instead, “overweight.” The distinction is, in itself, a functionally meaningless one; but it seems like the kind of thing that Trump, based on his well-known collection of vanities, might consider quite meaningful. As such, the figures have been treated by many as fishy—perhaps his height had been boosted an inch or two by his antigravity coiffure, or his weight shaved off by a pound or twenty.

The Republican Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, in his speech this week on the floor of the Senate condemning Trump’s “attacks on truth,” noted in particular “the seminal untruth of the President’s political career, the oft-repeated conspiracy about the birthplace of President Obama.” Flake was referring, of course, to birtherism, the racist conspiracy theory—eagerly taken up by Trump—that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to hold the office of President. Birthers went to all kinds of loony lengths in their quest to undermine Obama’s legitimacy—looking for clues in old newspaper clippings from around the world, inspecting official birth certificates for signs of digital manipulation, swapping theories in the darker corners of the Web. This week, as Twitter users responded with skepticism to Trump’s physical stats, especially his weight, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes proposed that anyone with such doubts be known as a “Girther.”

The hashtags #Girther and #GitherMovement quickly spread as people estimated, like players of a carnival game, what they thought to be Trump’s true weight. So far, Girthers have posted photographs of Trump standing next to other, more trustworthy leaders of known height, which seem to contradict the official report. In one, Trump appears to be roughly the same height as Obama (six feet one inch). In another, he appears to be an inch or two shorter than Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister (six feet two). Deadspin published a post showing photographs of Adonis-like professional athletes who are listed near Trump’s height and weight—the President is, apparently, four pounds heavier than the N.F.L. linebacker Luke Kuechly and a pound lighter than the baseball player Albert Pujols. (Comparing Trump to sports stars is clearly imprecise; body-mass index, according to the National Institutes of Health, “may overestimate body fat in athletes and others who have a muscular build,” and underestimate it “in older persons and others who have lost muscle.”) Others have pointed out that Trump’s most recent driver’s license, which was issued in 2012, lists him as six feet two inches—meaning that the seventy-one-year-old had somehow grown an inch in the intervening years. Trump’s defenders have cited an interview he did in 1999 with Maureen Dowd, of the Times, in which he said, “I photograph short. I’m 6 foot 3.” Perhaps it is all a problem of posture.

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