In an op-ed published Wednesday by British newspaper The Guardian, a columnist pointed the finger at President Trump for her lack of upper-body strength and her recent inability to “open jars.”
Titled “I stopped going to the gym because of Trump. Now I can’t open jars,” Australian columnist Brigid Delaney lamented the loss of a 2016 bet she’d made with the gym’s owner over who would win the presidential election: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Delaney had agreed to pull the gym’s heavyweight sled if Trump snagged the win, but noted that she’d sincerely hoped Clinton would ultimately be the victor.
Following Trump’s election, Delaney did indeed pull the sled, and said the experience left such a bad taste in her mouth that she has avoided the gym since, writing that she “associated it now with Donald Trump.”
“It was 9 November 2016 and my thinking about fitness changed almost overnight. In tune with the times, it became more Trump, less Obama,” Delaney wrote. “In the spirit of the Donald, I drank more bottles of Diet Coke and ate more McDonald’s. I dropped the gym — embracing Trump’s belief that we are given a certain amount of energy and if we use it then we are depleting a finite resource.”
Delaney has since returned to the gym, but said the process hasn’t been an easy one.
“I was fit in 2016, before Trump. But when you stop, it goes. And it goes quickly. A week or two and you have to start again with the 2kg dumbbells and the tremor in your forearms,” Delaney wrote. “I returned again this week — to the boredom and pain of the gym — trying to build up back to the strength I had before Trump became president.”
Last month, Delaney published a piece entitled, “Dear America, we can teach you about cruelty to refugees. Love, Australia,” hitting out at the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy.
