I find myself fascinated by a pointless lie because it is inescapably tragic. All it can do is diminish the person in the eyes of others. And this brings us to Donald Trump’s height. In January 2018, the Physician to the President, Ronny L. Jackson MD asserted that Donald Trump was 6’3″ tall (1.90m). This is so unlikely to be true, that it stretches credulity. There is no reason for Jackson to lie spontaneously about a patient’s height, and it seems probable that he was encouraged to add a few inches by the President himself.
When asked to self report height both men and women in the US tend to overstate it. Burke and Carman have suggested that overstating height is motivated by social desirability — you can never be too tall. There is ample evidence of Donald Trump’s (misplaced) search for the socially desirable with respect to his hair, his tan, his ethnicity, his intelligence and now his height.
In 2018 we learnt that Donald Trump was officially not quite Obese (body mass index (BMI) <30), and in 2019 he had nudged over the line into the obese range (BMI ≥30). Overstating height creates a problem in the calculation of BMI — which is mass (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters squared). Given that Donald Trump is likely shorter than 1.9m (6’3″), and probably closer to 1.854m (6’1″) this will have implications for whether he was really obese in 2018 (not just overweight as stated by his Physician) and just how obese he probably is (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Donald Trump’s BMI in 2018 and 2019 given different assumptions about his height [R-code here].
In 2018 Donald trump was just below the obese category if and only if he was really 6’3″ (1.9m) tall. At any height less than that he was obese in 2018 and he is obese today. His most likely true height given comparisons with others (cf, Barack Obama) is 6’1″, and this puts him comfortably in the obese range.
Misrepresenting one’s height does not create a problem if the lie is reserved for others — except perhaps in a political sense. Problems arise if one deludes oneself. Telling others that you are taller and healthier than you really are is one thing; if you lie to yourself you cannot properly manage your health.