What’s more, this idea of using sports as a means to physical health is at odds with comments by the president that have just now come uncomfortably to light.

I don’t check my phone much when running, but when something comes from The Atlantic’s David Graham, I stop what I’m doing. I was finishing a run along Rock Creek on Sunday evening when he alerted me to a story from The Washington Post. The headline: “Trump Thinks That Exercising Too Much Uses Up the Body’s ‘Finite’ Energy.”

Good Lord. I turned for home and started typing, full of energy from the run. Graham wasn’t the only one who sent me the story that night. It cites a Trump quote in the latest New Yorker, in which the commander-in-chief said he gave up sports after college because he “believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.”

This is exactly right. The body is a battery. The key to longevity and power is to sit perfectly still and keep the body constantly full of food. It will last indefinitely.

No, I mean, no. This is wrong. The Washington Post notes, “Experts say this argument is flawed because the human body actually becomes stronger with exercise.” I would argue that this is not an argument but a false statement. The accurate exercise-battery analogy is that exercise charges the human battery. And the body is a sort of battery that gets stronger the more it is charged.

I was hopeful that it might be an off-the-cuff colloquial misfire from Trump, but then found that writers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher recounted a similar instance in their recent book Trump Revealed:

After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”

“You are going to die young because of this” is something I say often to people, but never earnestly. It’s always a joke.

Here it doesn’t seem to be. The idea of the body’s energy as a finite resource fits well into Trump’s zero-sum worldview. In deals, there are losers and winners. Taxing people to create social programs is simply a drain on taxpayers. He frames the world in ways at odds with the idea that rising tides lift all boats, that investment in a healthy society pays dividends all around. As my colleague Stephanie Hayes noted in these pages last month, since our attitudes about our own health tend to be emblematic of deeper beliefs and values, a president who is committed to working out is seen to have more “self-control, discipline, and a willingness to exert oneself in pursuit of a goal—ideas that align with the good old-fashioned American belief in meritocracy, however illusory.”