Trump Says He Could Surpass Taft as Heaviest President

President Donald Trump has spent a lifetime chasing records. On a children's podcast posted the day before the Fourth of July, he named one he says he is actually trying not to break: heaviest president in American history.

The 80-year-old made the comment while sitting down with Second Lady Usha Vance for her show "Story Time with the Second Lady," a reading series meant to get kids back into books. The two read a White House Historical Association title called "Presidents Play," which walks through the sports and hobbies of past commanders in chief. Somewhere between the pages, the conversation landed on William Howard Taft, and Trump made an unprompted comparison to himself.

What He Actually Said

Talking about Taft, Trump told Vance: "He was a large man, very large. He loved baseball. He'd go to baseball games, loved the hot dogs at the baseball games. He was our heaviest president. And I have to be careful because I don't want to supersede his record. And a thing like that would be possible if I allowed it to happen."

Then he turned it into a message for the kids watching. "For all of you out there watching, keep yourself in good shape," he said, before adding a compliment to Vance about how she stays in shape herself. The clip went up on Vance's YouTube channel on Friday, timed right before the country's 250th birthday celebration.

It's the kind of offhand remark that would slide by from most people. Coming from a sitting president reading a picture book, it stuck. And it lines up with something the White House already put on paper earlier in the year.

The Number Behind the Joke

Trump's most recent physical put him at 238 pounds. He stands 6 feet 3 inches, which works out to a body mass index of 29.7. That matters because doctors draw the line for obesity at 30. He is sitting 0.3 points under it.

The other detail people picked up on: that 238 figure is a 14-pound jump from his previous checkup back in April of the prior year. So the record he joked about avoiding is closer than the punchline made it sound. BMI is a blunt tool and plenty of experts say a single number tells you almost nothing on its own, since it ignores muscle and build. But the trend line is what got attention, not the one figure.

Weight has followed Trump around his whole second term. His fans point to it as proof he's a regular guy who eats the same stuff they do. His critics use it as a jab. Either way, the man himself brought it up on a kids' show, which is why it made the rounds.

Who William Howard Taft Really Was

Taft is remembered today mostly for his size, which is a little unfair to the guy. He served as the 27th president from 1909 to 1913. He was roughly 6 feet tall and weighed around 243 pounds by the time he finished college. In office, some records suggest he topped 330 pounds. The Supreme Court of Ohio puts his presidential weight around 300.

His resume was long. He backed the 16th Amendment, the one that gave us the federal income tax. He shook up the State Department, went after dozens of antitrust cases, and appointed six Supreme Court justices. His moderate style cost him with the Republican base fast, and in 1912 he lost to Woodrow Wilson in a three-way race that also included his old boss, Theodore Roosevelt.

Here's the part Trump left out. Taft got the job he actually wanted after the White House. In 1921, President Warren Harding made him chief justice of the Supreme Court, a post he held until he died in 1930. Taft later wrote, "I don't remember that I ever was president." The man valued the bench over the Oval Office.

The Fast Food Reputation

If Taft had his hot dogs at the ballpark, Trump has his golden arches. His love of McDonald's is no secret. He has talked openly for years about ordering Big Macs and Filet-O-Fish, and campaign staffers have described his standard order in interviews.

Then there was the moment in April of 2026 that got people talking. Trump reportedly had a DoorDash driver bring a food delivery straight to the Oval Office for a White House feast. A president using a food delivery app the same way a college kid orders at midnight is the kind of image that sticks around.

So when he told a group of children to "keep yourself in good shape," the internet did the math. The advice was solid. The messenger came with a well-documented drive-thru history. That gap is a big part of why the clip traveled the way it did.

The "Fat Shot" Comments

Trump has weighed in before on the weight loss drugs everybody seems to be talking about. He has called GLP-1 medications the "fat shot." In an interview with the New York Times back in January, he said he has never taken the "fat drug" but "probably should."

That topic got sharper when STAT News ran a report speculating that a 79-year-old man given an experimental Eli Lilly weight loss drug might have been Trump. The White House flat out denied it. No proof tied the president to the report, and the administration pushed back hard.

Put those pieces together and you can see why the Taft crack drew a crowd. Trump has publicly floated the idea of taking a shot, then denied being connected to a specific one, then joked about a weight record on a children's podcast. It's a lot of weight talk from one person in a short stretch.

What One Doctor Made of It

Practicing internist Dr. Stuart Fischer, who is not one of Trump's physicians, told the Daily Mail that the president's most recent medical report doesn't give the public enough detail to really size up his condition. He also said the weight gain was worth a closer look rather than a shrug.

Fischer put it bluntly: "Someone has got to really quietly sit down and talk with him, and say, You're playing with fire." He floated the idea that a jump on the scale can sometimes trace back to other causes worth checking. It's an outside opinion, not a diagnosis, and he was clear he was working off limited public information.

Trump, for his part, framed the whole thing around time and duty. "You're at the White House for a short period of time," he told Vance. "It's an honor to be here, and you should work for the people, right?" His point being he has bigger things to do than worry about pool time.

The Obama Jabs and the July 4 Timing

Even on a gentle kids' reading show, Trump couldn't resist the politics. While he complimented several past presidents during the video, he took a few swings at former President Barack Obama. Old habits, new setting.

The timing was the other thing. The episode dropped on Friday, July 3, one day before the big America 250 celebrations marking the country's 250th birthday. A children's book about presidents, released right into a holiday weekend built around national pride, was clearly meant to fit the moment. The Taft comparison just happened to be the line everyone quoted afterward.

So there it is. A president reading to kids, telling them to stay in shape, while joking about a 300-pound record he sits closer to than the punchline let on. Taft got the last laugh in his own life, trading the presidency for the Supreme Court seat he actually wanted. Trump's version of the story is still being written, one physical at a time, and he made sure to say the ending is up to him.