How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (23 page)

Hey. Spoiler alert: No.

Maxing out at 340 lbs, William Howard Taft has the distinction of being not only our fattest president, but—wait, nope, that’s it. F
ATTEST
P
RESIDENT
. It’s on his tombstone and everything (and if it isn’t, I’m going to personally add it sometime in the future).

Taft’s presidency is mostly (unfortunately) remembered for how average it was. He followed Teddy Roosevelt, and even though Taft’s big fat giant feet could utterly annihilate Roosevelt’s literal shoes, Taft was never really a big enough man to fill them metaphorically. Roosevelt was a man who believed the president could and should do anything he wanted (unless the law explicitly said not to), and Taft was a lawman who thought the president could
only
do what was explicitly written in the Constitution. As a result, Taft’s administration was full of a lot of important reforms, but it lost the exciting sexiness of Roosevelt’s terms. His staunch by-the-book-ness earned Taft the
ire of Roosevelt, and presumably, like so many pairs of presidential pants, Taft almost ripped the Republican Party apart completely.

Did this upset Taft? Not really. In a lot of ways, Taft was one of the saner men to serve as president because, unlike almost everyone else in this book, Taft really,
really
didn’t want to be the president. Taft loved the law and wanted to be a chief justice of the Supreme Court, as that’s where his talents and interests lay. He only accepted the nomination in the first place because his ambitious wife wanted him to, and because Teddy Roosevelt had handpicked Taft as his successor, and when Teddy Roosevelt tells you to do something, you goddamn
do it
or risk having him punch you in the butt so hard your poop stays inside you forever out of fear of possibly running into Roosevelt.

Taft wasn’t exactly a do-nothing president; he really got rid of some dead weight in the Treasury Department and trimmed a lot of fat out of the military budget and busted a lot of bloated trusts and, in fact, the only time he broke a reduction-related promise was when he vowed to the American people that he’d lose thirty pounds while in the White House (he in fact gained quite a bit). That is a true fact, it’s not a fat joke. If you turned to this chapter looking for cheap fat jokes, well … just hang on for a few more paragraphs.

Taft eventually
did
excel at a job when Warren Harding finally named him chief justice of the Supreme Court after he’d left the White House; and serving on the court (the only president ever to do so) is what Taft considered to be the highlight of his life. Taft didn’t look back fondly on his presidency, and according to letters he wrote to close friends, he hardly even remembered his time spent in the White House at all.

This is largely because Taft
didn’t
spend too much time in the White House. He hated the job so much that he spent most of his time driving around or golfing or just generally avoiding being the president. He was always a big guy, but tended to overeat when he got into the White House, because he was so depressed and food was the only thing that cheered him up. As soon as he left office, he lost eighty pounds and was happier and healthier than he’d been
since college. In your fight with Taft, let’s hope you get the bloated, presidential, Elvis-at-the-end-of-his-career Taft, and not the fitter, more energized Elvis-at-literally-any-other-time Taft.

Much in the way that he’d never turn down a meal, Taft won’t turn down a fight, even if he’s not hungry for one. On the subject of punching jerks, Taft has said, “I am a man of peace and I don’t want to fight. But when I do fight, I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.” He was Yale’s intramural heavyweight wrestling champion, so he’s got a little more experience than a rat in a corner, but you will likely not be playing by standard Ivy League College Wrestling Rules in your fight, so that could be an advantage for you.

Now, this might sound crazy, but if you want to beat Taft, try to fight him around some bathtubs. This is because William Howard Taft, an adult man,
while president
, once got stuck in a bathtub.

It’s a fairly famous story but still one of my all-time favorite stories about presidents and my number-one favorite story about bathtubs. One day, Taft was bathing and was
so big
that he got stuck in the White House bathtub. He sat there for a while stewing, not only in his own considerable juices, but also in the knowledge that, no matter what he did as president or Supreme Court judge,
this
was what he’d be remembered for. He could do whatever he wanted, but at the end of the day, assholes who write books about presidents would still dedicate the bulk of their Taft chapters to this one, stupid, hilarious story.

Taft struggled to wriggle himself free of the tub’s clutches, but he knew it was no use. Finally, having abandoned the idea that maybe he could just live in the bathtub forever, Taft called to an aide to help him out. The aide recognized immediately that this wasn’t a job for one man and called three of his buddies and the team got Taft out and if they didn’t get any medals for doing it without laughing, they damn well should have. Four men. It took four men to extract the president of the Foodnited Tastes from his tub. A new tub was installed just to accommodate the large president, and that’s why today we have the Pacific Ocean.

Taft wasn’t just hilariously fat, he was also
hilariously fat
. As a result of his considerable weight, Taft had a problem with gas and flatulence (considered by many to be the ghosts of food trying to escape). He would embarrass the rest of his staff by burping and farting too much in front of visiting foreign dignitaries, and if that’s not bad enough,
shut up
, you’re lying, that’s
totally
bad enough. Taft would eat so much that he’d pass out in the middle of meetings and conversations. His body, one assumes, had to make a choice between dedicating its energy to digesting the impossible amount of food Taft ate that day or keeping him awake, and, more often than not, it chose digestion. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Big William only has four letters in his last name and three of them are
F-A-T
. Taft loved food so much that, when he took his inaugural oath, he swore on not a Bible, but an IHOP menu. William Taft was so big that he used to trick people into thinking his face was on Mount Rushmore just by
standing next to it. President Taft was so big he used the Bible Belt to keep his pants up. William Howard Motherfucking Taft was so big that when he sat around the White House, he sat
around
the White House and then
ate France
.

So, pound for pound (and pound and pound), he’s got you beat, and he’s clearly got some fight in him, but he’s also got enough food to feed all of Delaware in him, so your chances are pretty good. If he gets on top of you or suspects for even a second that any part of you is made of ham, you won’t stand a chance.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson is the only person in history to have a PhD
and
the presidency
and
a Nobel Peace Prize under his belt. He was also dyslexic, blind in one eye, and didn’t learn to read until age ten, which should tell you the most important lesson you need to learn about Wilson: if he wants something, he’s going to go for it. In his first term alone, he made more reforms and had more laws passed—including the Federal Reserve Act, child labor laws, and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission—than almost any other president before or since. It was on his watch that women were given the right to vote and workers were given the right to not work so many hours in a single day that they die.