Confession: I have yet to actually read Jared Kushner’s new memoir, but just as reading 25 books on the Israel-Palestine conflict made the former First Son-in-Law an expert on the Middle East, I feel that combing the internet for juicy Breaking History gossip makes me an authority on Kushner and his worldview. But I have to admit this remark he made during a sparsely attended interview live streamed on YouTube caught me off guard:
The one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since leaving the White House is getting some exercise in. I think that there’s a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation that’s going to live forever or the last generation that’s going to die and so we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.
Am I surprised that Kushner has come to the conclusion that elder millennials like us are going to live forever, and he failed to mention this in his 512-page memoir? Yes. But I’m even more taken aback by his assertion that exercise is key for those of us who want to be forever young, as this goes against the teachings of his father-in-law, Donald Trump.
In a 2017 New Yorker piece, Evan Osnos revealed that Trump attributes his longevity and astoundingly good health, which was independently verified by both Dr. Harold Bornstein and Dr. Mehmet Oz, to not exercising. “Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy,” Osnos wrote.
In their 2016 book Trump Revealed, Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher reported that Trump actually thinks wasting your precious energy allotment on unnecessary physical activity will lead to an early grave, as Vox noted:
After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”
So who am I to believe here? Unexpectedly svelte princeling Jared Kushner or my anti-exercise guru Donald Trump? What do Don Jr. and Tiffany think? Maybe this is like the Arrested Development chicken dance, and each member of the family has their own uniquely bonkers theory on why the normal rules of aging don’t apply to Trumps.
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