A month ago, the White House doctor, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, announced the results of Donald Trump’s first physical as the occupant of the Oval Office.
Given that Trump has had bone spur removal surgery (wink, wink) and scalp reduction surgery, I doubt that this was Trump’s first physical ever. But I balked at calling it a “presidential physical” in the headline. I don’t want to give him that.
Do you believe Donald Trump is 6’ 3” tall? Come on, let’s let him have that. Besides, the previous 6’ 2” measurement could have been an honest mistake. But I refuse to believe he weighs just 239 pounds.
A couple of weeks ago, I got on the scale in the lobby of the Guardian Building. And wouldn’t you know it, I weigh 239 pounds. I’m 5’ 9”. That’s “obese” going by the Body Mass Index (BMI).
I can make excuses: the scale in the Guardian Building probably hasn’t been calibrated in years, I was wearing a winter coat and steel-toed boots, plus I was carrying a DSLR in a camera bag (no battery grip, though).
The best excuse, though, is that the BMI is a rather imperfect metric. It’s just your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters, squared. That doesn’t account for bone density, age, etc.
So, 239 pounds is 108.4 kilograms. And 6’ 3” is 1.905 meters, so 108.4 divided by 3.629025 is roughly a 29.87 BMI, which is considered overweight but not obese. By contrast, 5’ 9” is 1.753 meters, so 108.4 divided by 3.073009 is roughly 35.27, which is considered obese.
BMI says nothing about “frames.” A man with very broad shoulders should have a little more leeway before being considered overweight or obese. But in that measurement I’m more like Woody Allen than Tim Tebow.
Plus I can’t deny the evidence of the mirror, or the evidence of the pants I can’t zip up all the way. I need to lose weight, even if I don’t set a number for my weight loss goal (I’ll eyeball it).
Suppose there is some magical way I can stretch myself to 6’ 3” while maintaining the same weight. I would hope the process would flatten my stomach. I think I would look good.
Look at Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo, 6’ 3” and 240 pounds. If I looked like that, I would probably decide I don’t need to lose any weight at all, my BMI be damned.
But if I looked like Trump, I would wonder why is it I can’t afford a top-notch personal trainer even though I’m supposed to be a billionaire (right, right, because I’m not actually a billionaire, I pretend to be one on TV).
Besides, Trump would treat a personal trainer the same way he treats lawyers: he doesn’t listen and he doesn’t pay.
For 239 pounds to be a “normal” weight according to BMI, I would have be at least 6’ 10” tall. The shortest I could be in order for 239 to be merely overweight rather than obese? 6’ 3”.
Wait a minute… what if Dr. Jackson chose to add an inch to Trump’s height so his 239 pounds would not be considered obese? A more plausible lie, because no one would believe Trump is 6’ 10”. Still, I find the 239 pounds highly suspect.
If Dr. Jackson had said Trump weighs 300 pounds, I would have believed him. I would believe 270 or even 250. Anything less than 250 strains credulity.
Here’s a theory: maybe Trump’s brain and heart are so tiny that most of the space that would normally be occupied by those organs is instead a neatly sealed vacuum.
But a human brain usually weighs 3 pounds, while a human heart usually weighs less than a pound. So the brain and heart vacuum theory fail to account for a discrepancy of at least 10 pounds.
If I’m obese, then Trump is morbidly obese. Consider for example that I have never run the Dearborn Trail, but I’ve walked it plenty of times. Trump might walk a few yards and then call for his golf cart.
Consider also how infrequently I eat McDonald’s. Something like four times in as many years. Each of those times it was because I had forgotten the reason I was boycotting McDonald’s at that particular time (there’s plenty of good reasons, but that’s a topic for another day).
And KFC has never appealed to me, though I do like their commercials. No secret recipe for me, chicken wings from Kroger or Honey Bee Market are fine by me.
Perhaps Dr. Jackson decided that tarnishing his medical reputation was a small price to pay to keep Trump’s insecurity from setting off World War III. Remember that Trump never called Kim Jong-un “short and fat.”
Of course the Constitution does not have any requirements for the physical fitness of a president, and the voters seem satisfied if it looks like the president won’t die of natural causes within the next four years.
The Constitution does imply certain moral and intellectual expectations for the president. And cognition is just one element of intelligence, a prerequisite for comprehension.
It was reported that Dr. Jackson thought about not giving Trump a cognition test with his physical, but Trump insisted. Do you believe that? I think Dr. Jackson was hoping to find evidence that Trump has some neurological problem.
Obviously Trump is psychologically unfit to be president. But if Dr. Jackson found evidence of a stroke or a brain tumor or something like that, he might have been able to convince Mike Pence to start a 25th Amendment Section 4 process.
Dr. Jackson administered to Trump the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which in hindsight the doctor would have realized is just a baseline of cognitive functioning. There’s a PDF of the test you can look at.
The first part of it tests if the patient can riffle the first five positive integers with the first five letters of the alphabet and connect them through a mildly scrambled pattern.
Then the patient has to copy a cube and draw a clock showing 11:10 (doesn’t matter if it’s a.m. or p.m.). The lines don’t have to be perfectly straight and the clock face doesn’t have to be a perfect circle.
Next, the patient has to correctly identify drawings of a lion, a rhinoceros and a camel. I have no doubt Donald Trump passed this part of the test; his son Barron could have passed it five years ago.
The parts testing short-term memory and concentration, those are the ones I’m skeptical Trump passed. Sometimes Trump seems to get distracted in the middle of a speech, or even in the middle of a tweet.
No wonder Trump’s lawyers are worried Trump would perjure himself talking to Robert Mueller. The stable genius would probably contradict himself within one interview or even within one answer.
Though I suppose it’s not perjury if first he lies and then tells the truth while still under oath. But with so many lies to keep track of, can Trump even remember what’s what?
Maybe Dr. Jackson caught Trump a lot of slack, or gave him more cues than the test author would have advised. Notice also that at the end the tester has the option to award an additional point if the patient has less than 12 years of education.
The patient is expected to read five words (“face,” “velvet,” “church,” “daisy,” “red”), repeat them and recall them a few minutes later, after doing another part of the test.
The next part of the test has the patient read back a few digits backwards and forwards, then distinguish the letter A from a sequence of seemingly random letters.
Then there is the famous serial sevens test, which measures short-term concentration with a very simple task of arithmetic. The patient has to count backwards from 100 in steps of 7. That is, starting at 100, repeatedly subtract 7.
So maybe Trump correctly figured that 100 minus 7 is 93, then got off on some tangent about United 93. And if after that Trump said we’ve got to eighty-six the bad hombres, Dr. Jackson would have said that’s good enough for the serial sevens.
The test form suggests it’s enough for the patient to go down to 65, but you can go down to 2. Actually, you can go even lower than that, as the sequence is infinite: −5, −12, −19, −26, −33, etc.
It’s not about testing mathematical prowess. I doubt few people could calculate several digits of π on the fly, they would have memorized them in advance. Professional mathematicians and amateurs alike memorize the first few powers of 2, the first few primes, the first few Fibonacci numbers.
Not many people memorize repeated subtraction of 7 starting from 100. But if they do, the tester can simply choose a different starting point and different decrement.
For example, count backwards from 89 in steps of 4, or backwards from 103 in steps of 5. The point is to choose a starting integer reasonably close to 100 and a decrement between 2 and 10, so that the arithmetic is simple but the patient can’t rely on advance memorization.
I think the serial sevens is a good test of short-term concentration even for people who are quite familiar with number theory, the branch of mathematics mostly concerned with the familiar positive integers of Z (I prefer blackboard bold but plain bold will do fine here).
They might notice that 100 is congruent to 2 modulo 7. So if they think they’ve gotten off track, they can just check the congruence. But if their short-term concentration is compromised, they might skip one of the numbers, e.g., go from 79 to 65, skipping 72.
Everyone knows 7 is a prime number, and more importantly here, coprime to 10, our base of numeration. Though 5 is also prime, it is not coprime to 10, so counting backwards in steps of 5 is much easier than counting backwards in steps of 7.
Even George Will knows that 7 is a prime number, since in Z+ it is divisible only by 1 and itself. Well, maybe Betsy DeVos doesn’t know, and Trump certainly doesn’t.
The definition George Will gave at least once on a Sunday morning political pundit show and in at least one column is that a prime number is divisible only by 1 and itself.
It’s divisible by only two positive integers, and by two negative integers. Now, some of you are itching to say that, even with that clarification, the definition of prime number George Will gave still falls short. Just wait, I’m getting to that.
So 7 is a prime number in Z, and so is −7. They’re both also “squarefree” numbers, since neither is divisible by any perfect squares other than 1. Numbers like 44 and 72 are not squarefree, since they are both divisible by 4, which is a square, and the latter number is also divisible by 9.
But 7 is not a prime number in every possible domain of numbers, and it’s not squarefree in domains like Z[√7], since (√7)2 = 7. Obviously. Likewise, −7 divided by √7 is −√7, so −7 is not squarefree in Z[√7] either.
What about the rings of algebraic integers adjoining square roots of squarefree positive numbers from the serial sevens test? Is 7 prime in those?
Actually no. Notice the perfect squares 9, 16 and 100 in the sequence. This tells us that 2 is a square modulo 7, and therefore, 7 is composite in the ring of algebraic integers of Q(√n) if n is a positive squarefree number congruent to 2 modulo 7.
You can verify the following with any calculator with a square root key (though parentheses keys would be a big help):
- (3 − √2)(3 + √2) = 7
- (4 − √23)(4 + √23) = −7
- (3/2 − √37/2)(3/2 + √37/2) = −7
- (15 − 2√58)(15 + 2√58) = −7
- (37 − 4√86)(37 + 4√86) = −7
- (10 − √93)(10 + √93) = 7
Don’t worry if you get results like 6.99999998 or 7.00000001 on your calculator. Those are due to a loss of machine precision. Meanwhile, Trump is trying to figure out how to write “boobs” on his calculator.
But what about 30, 51, 65, 79? It would seem that 7 is prime in the domains corresponding to the square roots of those numbers. However, notice that:
- (3 − √30)(3 + √30) = −21
- (3 − √51)(3 + √51) = −42
- (3 − √65)(3 + √65) = −56
- (3 − √79)(3 + √79) = −70
Those are all multiples of 7. So we need a stronger definition of primality, one that distinguishes between irreducibility and true primality: if p is a prime (not a unit) divisor of ab, then p must be a divisor of either a or b.
This stronger definition does not change anything in Z. For example, 15 is still not prime, because even though it is a divisor of 120 = 3 × 40, as it divides neither 3 nor 40, but 3 and 5 are still prime, as 3 divides itself trivially, and 5 divides 40.
It does change things in domains like Z[√30], allowing us to distinguish between numbers that are irreducible and prime, and numbers that are irreducible but not prime. There are none of the latter in unique factorization domains like Z.
In order for 7 to be prime in Z[√30], that domain would also have to contain either (3 − √30)/7 ≈ −0.353889367864523 or (3 + √30)/7 ≈ 1.211032225. Those are both algebraic numbers but neither is an algebraic integer.
And what about 2, 23, 37, 79, are they prime in Z[√7]? Here we get into nuances of quadratic reciprocity, since 7 is congruent to 3 rather than 1 modulo 4. So although (3 − √7)(3 + √7) = 2 and (10 − 3√7)(10 + 3√7) = 37, we find that Z[√23] and Z[√79] don’t “reciprocate” the non-primality of 7.
Checking in on stable genius Trump: he gave up on finding either 58008 or 80085, tossed aside the calculator, grabbed his Twitter phone and is now tweeting some insult or other at a celebrity. Either that or slandering Robert Mueller.
Clearly Trump is the least qualified person to deal with North Korea, regardless of whatever cognitive tests he might pass.