The New Yorker has a new article called “How Trump Could Get Fired.” It’s a fascinating and deeply depressing piece which details just how historically unpopular Emperor Baby Fists is and the depth to which no one knows what to do next (note: the New Yorker published this before Comey’s firing!). Like, the overwhelming majority of people hate Trump and wish he was out of office, but there’s not a lot happening on the impeachment front in real terms. I would recommend reading the full piece here. But I wanted to do a few highlights, because some of the quotes are amazing/terrifying. Also: did you know that Donald Trump thinks people who exercise are “misguided”? Ha.

His vice is consuming media coverage of himself: By this point in George W. Bush’s term, Bush had travelled to twenty-three states and a foreign country. Trump has visited just nine states and has never stayed the night. He inhabits a closed world that one adviser recently described to me as “Fortress Trump.” Rarely venturing beyond the White House and Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes through reports from friends, staff, and a feast of television coverage of himself. Media is Trump’s “drug of choice,” Sam Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, told me recently. “He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t do drugs. His drug is himself.”

Our American Banana Republic: Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, [was asked] if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a Presidency. “No, nobody has,” he said. “But we’ve never lived in a Third World banana republic. I don’t mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise.” Very few Republicans in Congress have openly challenged Trump, but Taylor cautioned against interpreting that as committed support. “My guess is that there’s only between fifty and a hundred Republican members of the House that are truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump as President,” he said. “The balance sees him as somewhere between a deep and dangerous embarrassment and a threat to the Constitution.”

Steve Schmidt speaks: “There is no one around him who has the ability to restrain any of his impulses, on any issue ever, for any reason. Where is the ‘What the f–k’ chorus?”

Trump’s exercise hatred: There has been considerable speculation about Trump’s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. His personal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, issued brief, celebratory statements—Trump’s lab-test results were “astonishingly excellent”—mentioning little more than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin. Trump himself says that he is “not a big sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald’s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.

[From New Yorker]

As Vox pointed out, Trump has a history of talking about how exercise is for losers. He truly believes that he’s better off than his friends who work out regularly because they’re “disasters” who always need hip or knee replacements. He actually believes that exercise is bad for you. Vox notes: “There was a time when doctors would have concurred with Trump on this. That was the Victorian era. Back then, people worried a physical activity could cause everything from exhaustion and heart palpitations, particularly in women. A century later, doctors’ thinking has moved on. Research now shows exercise is actually the closest thing we have to a miracle cure.”

As for the rest of it…I don’t even know what to say anymore. I’m just trying to stay sane here, but I don’t have much optimism left.

We haven't seen a hand-to-butt ratio like this since the T. rex roamed the Earth. pic.twitter.com/4e297BQwBQ

— Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) January 27, 2017

Photos courtesy of Getty.