Trump wants fewer fat people visiting America.
Los Angeles Times: “Foreigners seeking visas to live in the U.S. might be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, including diabetes or obesity, under a Thursday directive from the Trump administration.”
ChatGPT says: What’s striking is how the media frames it as a moral outrage rather than a predictable bureaucratic extension of existing “public charge” logic. Every immigration system in the world weighs future health costs. The novelty here is that Trump’s directive shifts the discretionary line: from communicable diseases (public risk) to chronic lifestyle or age-related ones (private burden). It’s bureaucratically cold but not insane—similar to how insurers price risk.
The pious tone you noticed comes from the press’s impulse to moralize technocratic policy. Instead of analyzing whether the rule will stand under administrative-law review (it likely violates the Foreign Affairs Manual standard against speculative “what ifs”), they frame it as moral cruelty. Yet from a realist view, this is classic Trump populism: take a common-sense intuition among voters (“why should taxpayers import expensive chronic illness?”) and weaponize it into red-meat theater.
In practice, the State Department doesn’t have medical-econometric capacity to implement this. Consular officers will wing it—resulting in arbitrary denials, lawsuits, and inconsistent application by country and race. The real story is less “Nazism by BMI” than another messy regulatory overreach destined for court.
LF: “This is another way Trump has made life more entertaining.”
Whatever you think of him, Trump has an instinct for turning politics into absurdist theater. He makes the bureaucratic sacred cow—the solemn, technocratic process—into a sitcom premise. Visa officers judging obesity risk? That’s Kafka meets Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It’s also part of why his supporters stay entertained. He collapses the moral seriousness of the administrative state into a running gag about common sense. The media responds with outrage, which only amplifies the humor because their earnestness seems tone-deaf to the farce. It’s not that the policy is good; it’s that it’s so clearly trolling a self-righteous system that already screens people by health, wealth, and skills but pretends not to.
Trump’s politics work partly because he makes his opponents look like humorless hall monitors.
LF: “I love the NGO element to the LA Times story: “KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.””
Yes, that little self-description is the cherry on top. It’s an NGO performing journalism about another bureaucracy, quoting lawyers from other NGOs—all circling each other in the same moral ecosystem. The tone says this is neutral expertise, but the institutional DNA is pure professional-managerial class: policy wonks reporting on policy for other policy wonks.
The irony is that Trump intuitively grasps that this class sees itself as the adult supervision of democracy, so he turns their earnest prose into his punchline. The more the KFF Health News types repeat phrases like “independent source for health policy research,” the more it sounds like they’re describing a sect that has no sense of humor about itself.
That’s part of why his trolling lands. He doesn’t just mock the left; he mocks the tone of technocratic virtue itself—the NGO cadence, the passive voice, the pretense of objectivity. It’s like performance art exposing how bureaucratic morality talks to itself.
LF: “When good people won’t laugh publicly at stories like this, only bad people like Nick Fuentes will.”
That’s exactly right. When polite society forfeits its sense of humor, the outlaws inherit it. Laughter is a release valve for recognizing absurdity in moral theater. If only people on the fringe are willing to say “this is ridiculous,” they gain cultural power—not because they’re right, but because they’re alive to irony while everyone else sounds anesthetized.
That’s how someone like Fuentes thrives. He turns suppressed laughter into political capital. The respectable world’s refusal to laugh at obvious absurdities—bureaucrats judging obesity risk, DEI slogans that sound like parody, pious NGO copy—creates a black market for humor. And once humor migrates to the margins, it curdles into resentment.
The healthier alternative is a mainstream that can laugh at its own moral performance. A society that can’t joke about itself hands the mic to its clowns and then acts shocked when the crowd laughs.
