Category: New Jersey

Is Jack Ciattarelli Winning in New Jersey?

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Jack Ciattarelli (left) and Mikie Sherrill (right)

Far be it from me to predict that Republicans are on the verge of winning this year’s gubernatorial election in New Jersey, but (a) Jack Ciattarelli came pretty close to knocking off incumbent Phil Murphy four years ago, and (b) with Murphy term-limited, Democrats nominated Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who hasn’t exactly been running away with it. Ever since an Emerson College poll last month showed the New Jersey race to be a dead heat, Democrats have been freaking out about it.

How bad is the New Jersey freakout? Bad enough that Molly Jong-Fast felt the need to write a New York Times column about it:

When you spend as much time around Democratic Party people as I do, you find that everybody is worried about something. The specter of 2024, and the reign of Trump terror that has followed, has the party on edge. The polls are mostly in Democrats’ favor, but, they worry, what are we not seeing? What are we not hearing? They’re worried they’ve lost their mojo in the face of MAGA.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the governor’s race in New Jersey. Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democrats’ great-on-paper centrist nominee, is ahead in the polls but still being second-guessed.
I felt this skittishness this for myself when I attended a “No Kings” rally last weekend in the blue town of Montclair. It’s a community full of commuters but also the home of Ms. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped her reddish district in 2018. Her opponent is the suspiciously well-tanned Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who is running for governor for the third time in a row.
Ms. Sherrill is ahead in the polls, but that doesn’t quiet the doubters. The pollster G. Elliott Morris of Fifty Plus One put it best when he texted me, “It would be surprising if Ciattarelli won, but bigger upsets have happened before.”
New Jersey is a Rorschach test for a party in full freakout. . . .

While I do not hold G. Elliott Morris in high regard (and he certainly has no regard for me), his summary of the New Jersey campaign is probably pretty accurate: Yes, a win for Ciattarelli would be considered an upset, but it’s not impossible. Not a single poll has shown Ciattarelli actually leading the race, and this is a state where Kamala Harris won by a six-point margin last year. If we were wagering, and I was willing to bet Sherrill wins by a three-point spread — in other words, half the margin Kamala won by in New Jersey — would you bet against me?

You see that, as a matter of probability, a Republican win in New Jersey would be surprising, as Morris says, but the fact that Democrats are even worried about it is a very good sign for Republicans. Molly Jong-Fast speaks of “the reign of Trump terror,” and if it were widely regarded as such, you’d expect the Democratic candidate in a blue state like New Jersey to have a cake walk — Mikie Sherrill on her way to winning by a double-digit margin — but that’s not happening, is it?

This paragraph of Molly Jong-Fast’s column is priceless:

One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women. After all, this is a party that has run two supercompetent women for president on its ticket, and they both lost against Mr. Trump.

“Miasma,” ma’am? Hunting around for a fancy substitute for “attitude” or “prejudice,” what on earth would lead you to miasma?

Awkward word choices aside, what color is the sky in your universe, where a candidate’s “biggest problem” is the attitude of pundits?

The pundit class weighed in on this topic:

Do you see what I mean about the New Jersey situation being a very good sign for Republicans? Whether or not Ciattarelli scores an upset victory, the strength of his campaign has backed Democrats into a corner where they’re second-guessing themselves and arguing with each other about tactics and strategy. And the credit for this goes to none other than Donald J. Trump, who defeated both of those “supercompetent women” and thereby demonstrated that identity politics can be a liability.

If somehow Ciattarelli wins this thing, I’ll give a lot of credit to Scott Presler, who’s been doing his ground-game magic in New Jersey. Presler’s work in Pennsylvania last year played a key role in helping Trump win there, and knocking off the allegedly “supercompetent” Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey would demonstrate his effectiveness again.



 

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GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! Jury Convicts Corrupt Democrat Senator Menendez

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Perhaps the phrase “corrupt Democrat” is redundant:

The jury in the federal corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and two of his business associates, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, found Menendez guilty on all charges after a grueling nine-week complex trial in Manhattan. . . .
Jurors deliberated for three days. . . .
In his five-hour closing argument on Tuesday, federal prosecutor Paul Monteleoni urged jurors to hold the New Jersey Democrat accountable for his alleged misconduct.
“This is a big case,” Monteleoni said. “But it all boils down to a classic case of corruption on a massive scale.”
During the trial, prosecutors used cited emails and text messages from Menendez – as well as FBI testimony – to present evidence they argued shows the senator accepted extravagant gifts from foreign governments. The gifts totaled more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed throughout Menendez’s New Jersey home.
Menendez was charged by federal prosecutors with 18 counts since he pleaded innocent last year, all relating to a multiyear alleged bribery scheme involving the Egypt and Qatar governments.
In March, an 18-page indictment was wrapped into Menendez’s existing charges already against him and his co-defendants — including his wife, Nadine — for allegedly acting as a foreign agent and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to benefit the Egyptian government through his power and influence as a senator.

New Jersey voters really know how to pick ’em, eh?



 

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It’s Only Confederate Flags, They Said

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Statue of John Witherspoon at Princeton University

The destructive mobs of organized ignorance (which is to say, the Left) began their crusade by playing upon the anti-Southern prejudices of Yankees. Nearly 30 years ago, one scholar who had followed this “controversy” from the outset explained its origin to me very simply: By the early 1990s, the NAACP was nearly bankrupt, not merely due to mismanagement, but because of the general public opinion that the organization had outlived its purpose. The money had ceased to roll in, and the NAACP was in need of something to help with its fundraising. The public display of the Confederate flag was seized upon as a focus because, the scholar explained, it had a magical effect upon rich Jewish women in certain posh neighborhoods of Manhattan. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help any local blacks — at the time, the Jew-hating clown Al Sharpton had made himself the primary public spokesman for New York’s black population — but the idea of black people being oppressed in the South, oh, they couldn’t write those donation checks fast enough!

Such is the true story of why the crusade to tear down Confederate symbols got started in the early 1990s, more than a quarter-century after the triumph of the civil rights movement, at a time when black people in the South were certainly less oppressed than they’d ever been before. All the allegedly well-meaning people who supported that crusade were fools at best, and perhaps not really as well-meaning as they claimed. But the argument that Southerners should accept this insulting revisionism without protest was always couched with assurances that the demand to take down the Confederate flag was the only concession required to placate the “activists.” In quite the same manner, Chamberlain argued it wouldn’t hurt to let Hitler have the Sudetenland: “Peace for our time!”

We have long since passed the point where any intelligent person expects this radical iconoclasm to end at some logical stopping point. The summer of “mostly peaceful” riots in 2020 saw assaults upon monuments to people who never had anything to do with the Confederacy, except perhaps to oppose it. The very fact that there was a public statue honoring a dead white man seemed to signify in the minds of the leftist mobs that the person so honored must be a RAAAAACIST and therefore the statue was vandalized. And now, in seeking targets for their outrage, the mob has come for an 18th-century Presbyterian:

A Princeton University committee is slated to consider the removal of a prominent statue of Founding Father John Witherspoon in the center of their campus as a result of a petition demanding its removal.
Witherspoon was a member of the second Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and was Princeton’s sixth president.
But he owned two slaves on his farm in New Jersey and voted against a plan for abolition in the state, according to historical records.
A petition, started by three graduate students in the Philosophy Department, states that the “prominent place on campus of the John Witherspoon statue is inappropriate” and calls on the university to “remove it from its pedestal in Firestone Plaza.”
The petition asks that officials replace the statue with an informational plaque that reflects both the “positive and negative aspects of Witherspoon’s legacy.”
The petition adds that the statue, as it stands, pays honor to Witherspoon in a way that ignores his participation in and support for American slavery.
“In such a hub of University life, where people eat, study, socialize, and commute on a daily basis, should students, staff, and faculty not be free from the elevated gaze of someone who held beliefs, and engaged in and defended practices, which we all find so repulsive,” the petition asked.
“Particularly for community members descended from enslaved peoples, the homage the statue does to Witherspoon can be a jarring experience.”

The puerile shallowness of this attack on Witherspoon’s reputation is breathtaking. Born in Scotland in 1723, Witherspoon received his master’s degree from University of Edinburgh at age 16. A staunch Protestant, he was briefly imprisoned during the Catholic-led Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Subsequently gaining prominence as a minister and theologian in Scotland’s Presbyterian church, in 1768 Witherspoon was recruited by American admirers to become president of a certain struggling Presbyterian college in New Jersey. His tenure at what would eventually become known as Princeton University was so successful that perhaps no major institution of learning in the world owes so much to the work of one man. If you’re going to dishonor Witherspoon, you might as well blow up Princeton while you’re at it. (And considering the wretched quality of the “argument” put forth in the student petition, blasting Princeton to smithereens probably wouldn’t be much of a loss.)

The enemies of Witherspoon are anti-American — opponents of our constitutional system of limited government, which directly reflects his influence. Among his students was a certain young Virginian who took away from Witherspoon’s lectures a strong impression of the need for checks and balances in government to restrain tyrannical ambition. But if James Madison was foremost among Witherspoon’s students, certainly he was not alone in achieving prominence:

From among his students came 37 judges (three of whom became justices of the U.S. Supreme Court); 10 Cabinet officers; 12 members of the Continental Congress, 28 U.S. Senators, and 49 U.S. Congressmen.

Did I mention that Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from New Jersey? Kind of important, I think.

All of this is to be cast aside, of course, because Witherspoon is a dead white man, and all dead white men are RAAAAACISTS!

It’s almost as if all this is not really about anything else except hating white people. But you can’t point that out, because pointing it will be cited as proof that you are guilty of RAAAAACISM!

Nobody would listen to us Southerners when we tried to warn y’all where this trend was heading, way back in the 1990s. Being vindicated ought to feel good, but it’s a bitter sort of satisfaction, in such circumstances.




 

Transgender ‘Rights’ vs. Common Sense

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Say hello to Demetrius Minor, who was 16 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after a plea bargain on manslaughter and carjacking charges in 2011 in Camden County, New Jersey:

A Gloucester Township teenager has admitted to killing his foster father in July.
Demetrius Minor, 16, pleaded guilty Friday to aggravated manslaughter in the July 11 death of Theotis Butts. Minor also pleaded guilty to carjacking in connection with a May 29 incident in which he ordered a couple out of their Pontiac Grand Prix at gunpoint and drove away with their vehicle . . .
The May carjacking incident began shortly before 5 p.m. when Minor approached a couple as they entered their vehicle near their Gloucester Township home. Minor approached the couple and pointed a Glock .45 in the face of the woman. The couple’s infant child was in the car at the time of the incident, and they were able to get the baby out of the car before Minor sped away in their car. The woman’s husband tried to chase Minor in another vehicle but lost track of him. About two hours later in Bridgeton, local police officers who had been alerted to the car theft spotted the Grand Prix and pursued. That pursuit ended when Minor jumped out of the vehicle and escaped.
A warrant had been issued for Minor’s arrest in connection with the carjacking when he broke into Butts’ home on the first block of Hemlock Drive in Gloucester Township on July 11. Butts, a 67-year-old retiree, had taken Minor in from the foster system, though Minor was no longer living there. According to township police records, Minor had burglarized the home numerous times after moving out. Minor stabbed Butts several times and fled to New York City.

These are truly heinous crimes, and this background should be kept in mind when you read about the self-declared “transgender” inmate now calling himself “Demi” Minor:

A transgender woman behind bars at a New Jersey women’s prison impregnated two fellow inmates, prompting officials to move her to a different facility, a report revealed Saturday.
Demi Minor, 27, was moved last month from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women to the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility — a prison for young adults in Burlington County, a New Jersey Department of Corrections spokesman told NJ.com.
Minor, who is serving a 30-year sentence for manslaughter, is in a vulnerable unit in the new facility where she is the only woman, the spokesman said.
Minor wrote in a blog post on the website Justice 4 Demi on July 15 that she was placed on suicide watch at the new facility “due to the fact that I had hung myself in the van.” She claimed guards denied her request to be strip-searched by a female DOC officer.
“[NJDOC] have violated my right to be safe and free from sexual harassment, by putting me in one of the most violent youth Correctional facilities,” Minor wrote. “While living here at GYSC, I have found my self (sic) under attack by young inmates who are immature and just plain ignorant towards a person like me.”
She said she was briefly transferred to New Jersey State Prison, where she “was called he and him well over 30 times,” adding, “this has not happened to me in years being referred to primarily as a man.”
An earlier post stated that Minor was forcibly removed from the female prison and beaten during the transfer. The DOC declined to comment on the accusations but told NJ.com it was investigating.
“NJDOC cannot comment on any active investigations,” the agency said. “The Department has zero tolerance for abuse, and the safety and security of the incarcerated population and staff are of critical importance.”
Minor’s move comes months after it was revealed that she had impregnated two inmates while locked up at the female prison after engaging in “consensual sexual relationships with another incarcerated person.”
In 2021, New Jersey enacted a policy to allow prisoners to be housed in accordance with their preferred gender identity. The policy, which must be in place for at least a year, was part of a settlement from a civil rights suit brought by a woman forced to live in men’s prisons for 18 months.
The DOC told NJ.com it still operates under the policy but “the department is currently reviewing the policy for housing transgender incarcerated persons with the intention of implementing minor modifications.”
Housing decisions, the spokesman said, “are made within the parameters of the settlement agreement which requires consideration of gender identity and the health and safety of the individual.”
Minor will be eligible for parole in 2037, according to the outlet.

Notice that New Jersey did not defend the “civil rights” lawsuit in court, but rather reached an out-of-court settlement, so that the prison policy is not guided by any actual court ruling. There is no judge’s decision we can cite as responsible for this lunacy. Instead, it seems, New Jersey officials simply outsourced their prison policy to the ACLU and, gosh, who could have foreseen that this would produce bad results? Unexpectedly!




 

Virginia: ‘Too Close to Call’? BREAKING UPDATE: Youngkin Wins!

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UPDATE 12:55 a.m. ET Wednesday: Glenn Youngkin wins Virginia!

*** PREVIOUSLY (7:14 p.m. ET) ***

Tonight I’m watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they’re trying to sell the Virginia gubernatorial election as a “toss-up,” but they just reported their own exit-poll results which look very bad for Democrat Terry McAuliffe. We shall see what happens.

UPDATE 7:40 p.m.: Official totals as of 7:30 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 168,239 (55.93%)
McAuliffe ……. 130,337 (43.33%)

With about 12% of precincts reporting, this is good news.

UPDATE 8 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 7:50 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 457,620 (58.34%)
McAuliffe ……. 321,315 (40.96%)

About 31% of precincts reporting, and this is even better news, because Youngkin’s lead appears to be widening as the evening goes on.

UPDATE 8:10 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 8 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 608,574 (57.02%)
McAuliffe ……. 451,192 (42.27%)

About 40% of precincts now reporting, and it continues to look encouraging for Youngkin. CNN’s John King was just pointing out higher-than-usual turnout in some rural “red” counties. Fingers crossed.

UPDATE 8:15 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 8:10 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 709,999 (57.04%)
McAuliffe ……. 525,854 (42.24%)

About 46% of precincts now reporting. It is expected there will be about 3 million votes cast in Virginia, and we still have less than half the vote, so we can be cautiously optimistic, with the emphasis on “cautiously.” The final vote is probably going to be very close.

UPDATE 8:30 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 8:20 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 794,650 (56.88%)
McAuliffe ……. 592,389 (42.40%)

About 52% of precincts now reporting. Still looking good, but remember that if there will be about 3 million total votes, the winner will have to get at least 1.5 million, so there’s a long way to go.

UPDATE 9 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 8:50 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 1,071,663 (54.93%)
McAuliffe ……. 865,345 (44.36%)

About 68% of precincts now reporting. Again, to point out the simple math, if we estimate a final vote total around 3 million, McAuliffe would have to get nearly 70% of the remaining votes to win. Which is theoretically possible, of course, if Democrats resort to the usual tricks of dumping in truckloads of “extra” ballots at 3 a.m.

UPDATE 9:25 p.m. ET: I’ve switched the TV to MSNBC, where Nicolle Wallace is on the verge of tears. Official totals as of 9:20 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 1,246,500 (54.21%)
McAuliffe ……. 1,036,170 (45.06%)

About 78% of precincts now reporting. Strong turnout in rural Virginia, plus “flipping” a few key suburban areas, appears to have yielded a victory for (alleged right-wing Donald Trump puppet) Glenn Youngkin.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: If my arithmetic is correct, and the estimate of about 3 million total votes in Virginia is also correct, then Youngkin only needs to get about 35% of the remaining vote to win.

UPDATE 9:35 p.m. ET: The meltdown on MSNBC is hysterical. Watch Nicolle Wallace go on about “The Big Lie” and the “deadly insurrection” of January 6, as if ordinary voters in Roanoke and Newport News are as obsessed with that as the people in the liberal media echo chamber:

Nicolle’s in the Guyana jungle, drinking the Kool-Aid.

UPDATE 11:10 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 11 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 1,545,345 (51.27%)
McAuliffe ……. 1,444,933 (47.94%)

About 92% of precincts now reporting. Everybody knows Youngkin has won, but the networks continue the “too close to call” charade.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Every liberal on Twitter is now whining about Critical Race Theory and “racist” white voters.

UPDATE 11:35 p.m. ET: Official totals as of 11:30 p.m. ET:

Youngkin …….. 1,567,817 (51.16%)
McAuliffe ……. 1,472,945 (48.06%)

About 94% of precincts now reporting. Probably going to be tomorrow before the networks finally admit Youngkin won Virginia.

Oh, by the way, some Republican you never heard of before is currently leading Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy in New Jersey.




 

I’ll Take ‘Things Not to Say to a Jersey Cop While You’re Holding a Knife’ for $400

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What is “I’m gonna stab him”?

Excuse me if I took some time off from writing my long Breonna Taylor post — which I promise I will finish — in order to watch some more police bodycam videos. This one is from Asbury Park, N.J., where police responded to a domestic violence call Aug. 21. They found a woman outside, and went inside the apartment where they encountered Hasani Best, 39, who was armed with a knife and barricaded himself in a bedroom. For about 45 minutes, cops tried to negotiate Best’s surrender. The guy in charge was Sgt. Sean DeShader, a black man who in 2016 was named the department’s “Officer of the Year.”

In the bodycam video released this week, you hear Best ranting profanely and even telling the cops to shoot him. DeShader tries to defuse the situation, joking and laughing. This was obviously not the first time police had been called to deal with Best. In the 911 call that summoned police, a neighbor says “the couple was known for fighting physically,” and that the woman was screaming for help.

Early in the standoff, police used a taser, but it was ineffective. Over and over, DeShader tells Best: “Put the knife down and come on out.”

In the final moment, Best opens the door halfway, knife in hand, and gestures toward an officer standing to the left of Sgt. DeShader.

“I’m gonna stab him.”

One second later, DeShader fires twice.

 

A lot of people who have viewed this video are critical of Sgt. DeShader’s decision to fire. Best did not visibly lunge toward the officers before he was shot, but on the other hand, this encounter was happening at close range. The cops were in a hallway, with no more than five or six feet between themselves and the bedroom door. If Sgt. DeShader had waited a half-second longer, who knows what might have happened?

But a point I’ve made before: How many times does a cop have to tell you to drop the knife? What part of “drop the knife” is so difficult to understand? If a cop was pointing a gun at me, I guarantee you he wouldn’t have to tell me twice. But after repeated warnings, Best then made an explicit threat: “I’m gonna stab him.”

He chose . . . poorly.




 

U.S. Coronavirus Daily Deaths Have Decreased 43% in the Past Four Weeks

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Since peaking April 21, the daily number of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 have decreased from an average of more than 2,000 per day to fewer than 1,200. This decrease has been mainly due to sharp reductions in the rate of death in the two hardest-hit states of New York and New Jersey.

During the week of April 20-26, there were 14,511 coronavirus deaths in the United States, a daily average of 2,073. During the week of May 18-24, there were 8,315 deaths, an average of 1,188 daily. During this period, the combined total of COVID-19 deaths in New York and New Jersey declined from 5,713 (April 20-26) to 1,639 (May 18-24), a 71% reduction. These two states have the highest per-capita coronavirus death rates in the country, and have accounted for 40% of all U.S. deaths from the disease during the course of the pandemic. The declining death rates in New York and New Jersey, however, mean that during last week their combined deaths were just 20% of the U.S. total.

 

 

As Professor Glenn Reynolds pointed out, data about the pandemic has been interpreted to reflect negatively on Republican-controlled states. Whereas the daily death rate in districts with Democrat representatives in Congress have declined sharply from an April peak, the rate in Republican areas — which has always been much lower — has “remained relatively steady,” according to a Pew Research analysis. Yet the fact is, despite this trend, the rate in Democrat districts is still nearly three times higher than in GOP districts. The huge spike of deaths in New York and New Jersey in March and April is the remarkable anomaly in the data, rather than the low, but “relatively steady,” death rates elsewhere.


 

The Battle of Atillis Gym

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This may go down in history books as the 21st-century Concord Bridge:

A few hours after workouts began Monday morning at New Jersey’s Atilis Gym — which is making national headlines for its early reopening in defiance of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s coronavirus shutdown order — police showed up outside the Bellmawr business.
What happened next?
The large group of people outside the gym were angry and hostile, likely believing the officers showed up to shut down the gym, hand out tickets, or even make arrests. Amid the mostly unintelligible hollering, a few phrases rang out clearly:

“You have the right to refuse unconstitutional orders!”
“Freedom!”
“You swore an oath to protect our rights!”

Soon enough the crowd quieted down enough so that one of the officers was able to address them.
“We are and we’re only here for everybody’s safety today,” the officer began. “We planned for the worst, hoped for the best, and it seems like that’s what we have out here today. Formally, you are all in violation of the executive order.”
Then came the officer’s surprising follow-up statement: “On that note, have a good day. Everybody be safe.”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

In other COVID-19 news, President Trump revealed he has been taking hydroxychloroquine as a precaution, and the media freaked out:

President Donald Trump on Monday confirmed at the White House that he was taking hydroxychloroquine and zinc as preventatives against the coronavirus.
“I happen to be taking it. I’m taking it. Hydroxychloroquine. Right now, yeah,” he said.
Trump said that he had been taking the medicine for about a week and a half.
“I’m taking the two, the zinc and the hydroxy, and all I can tell you is, so far I seem to be ok,” Trump said.
He said that a doctor and many others had sent him positive letters about the effectiveness of the drug.
“I’ve heard a lot of good stories and if it is not good, I will tell you right,” he said. “I’m not going to get hurt by it.”
The president spoke to reporters about the drug on Monday afternoon at a White House roundtable with restaurant owners.
“I’m still here,” he said, saying that he had “zero symptoms” from the drug or the virus.

Predictably, CNN gave air time to Trump’s enemies to tell lies:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to President Trump as “morbidly obese” during an appearance Monday night on CNN and said he shouldn’t be taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off coronavirus.
Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, made the remark in an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360” during which she was asked about Mr. Trump’s taking the drug, which he’d revealed earlier in the day.
She said taking that drug was not a good idea for the president because of his “age group and in his, shall we say, weight group,” which she described as “morbidly obese.”
The 80-year-old speaker, who is second in the presidential succession line behind Vice President Mike Pence, said she would “rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists.”
To be considered “morbidly obese,” a technical term, a person would have to be 100 pounds over his ideal body weight and have a BMI of 40 or more, or 35 or more if he also has obesity-related health conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure.
Those conditions would not seem to apply to Mr. Trump.
His body-mass index, according to a 2019 medical examination, is 30.4, which is considered “obese,” but not morbidly so.
At 6-foot-3, his 243-pound weight isn’t close to 100 pounds too much, and the same physical put him in “very good health overall” with a resting pulse rate of 70 and a blood pressure reading of 118/80 — all three figures well within normal range.

Ask around and see how many people over 60 are in such excellent health as President Trump. If he’s not as lean as a marathon runner, perhaps it’s because he has been too busy to go jogging lately. As to the Speaker’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine has “not been approved by scientists,” (a) the drug has been commonly prescribed for more than 70 years, and (b) many health-care workers, including nurses and doctors, are doing exactly what Trump is doing, using the hydroxy/zinc combination as preventative medicine during the pandemic. Also, as many people pointed out, if Trump is “morbidly obese,” what is Stacey Abrams?