Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico. Ruaíri Arrieta-Kenna is an intern at Politico.

As he rages across the national stage, hurling tweet-bolts of invective at his foes, dismantling an entire political party from within and vowing to wipe terrorist networks from the face of the earth, it’s worth remembering that the titanic personality now running for president can be brought to a sputtering halt by the sight of a single cigarette butt. Or a mole on a woman’s cheek. Or the wrong color shoes on an employee.

Like Howard Hughes, the famously eccentric billionaire for whom he has expressed deep admiration, Donald Trump is a bundle of peculiar habits and ideas that, were he not running for the highest office in the nation, might just be charmingly idiosyncratic. But over decades of self-aggrandizing self-help books and countless no-idea-too-banal interviews, Trump has introduced into the public record everything from his phobia of baldness to his convictions that exercise saps vitality rather than restoring it. And don’t get him started on asbestos and the competitive advantages of sleep deprivation.


1. Exercise will destroy you

Trump believes the human body is like a battery. Energy used is energy lost. For this reason, he doesn’t like exercising too much, and he doesn’t like his employees exercising too much either, according to former Atlantic City casino executive Jack O’Donnell who worked for Trump from 1987 to 1990.

“All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements—they’re a disaster,” he explained last year.

In spite of this stated aversion, Trump has talked often about his athletic prowess as a student—he played baseball in high school at New York Military Academy and squash in college at Fordham—but as an adult? He used to play tennis but quit because the points required too much patience. And walking? Jogging? Nope. All that takes too much time.

“To stay in shape,” he said back in 1986, when he was not yet 40 years old, “I try to walk up as many flights of stairs as I can when I’m in a building under construction.”

He still enjoys golf, although he has played less, he has said, since he started running for president. But campaigning he considers a form of exercise—standing and sweating on a stage, ranting and raving into a microphone. Even simply making hand gestures (which he performs with the intensity of a zoomba routine), he told Dr. Oz, gets the heart rate up.

More revealing than his odd thoughts about exercise is the reason he even tries to stay in some semblance of shape. It gets at his trust issues, his conviction that vulnerability is not a sign of humanity but rather of weakness. “You’ve got to take care of your body and stay healthy,” he told Men’s Health a few years ago. “You don’t want to be a liability. You don’t want to become somebody’s patient.”

2. Germs are worse than exercise

Donald Trump, who has on many occasions called the tradition of shaking hands “barbaric,” confessed in his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback: “One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands, and the more successful and famous one becomes the worse this terrible custom seems to get. I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.”

But Trump’s germophobia goes beyond an unwillingness to shake hands—an aversion he has had to forgo during his run for the presidency. Trump is also reported to have a preference for drinking with straws and eating pizza with a fork, a distaste for pressing elevator buttons and a revulsion to fans and the public getting too close to him, such as for autographs. In an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, Gurnek Bains, author of Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization and founder of a corporate psychology consultancy, suggests that Trump’s fear of communicable diseases is the root of his anti-immigrant political stances.

His obsession with cleanliness is why he prefers mass-produced or processed food. His preferences are not complicated: KFC. McDonald’s. The occasional taco bowl.

“I like See’s Candies.” “I like hamburgers.” “I’m an ice cream fan from way back.”

“I don’t like rich sauces or fine wines,” Trump wrote in his book Surviving at the Top. “I like to eat steak rather than pheasant under glass.” So long as the steak is well-done—so well-done, according to his longtime butler, “it would rock on the plate.”

His simplistic palate is a function of his desire for cleanliness. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this year. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.”

3. Imperfection is unacceptable

As one of Trump’s top casino executives in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell had an at-the-boss’-elbow view of what preoccupied Trump. In 1991, O’Donnell wrote a “tell-all” about his time working for the Donald. In Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump, O’Donnell describes multiple moments where Trump’s fixation on appearance would manifest in an abhorrence for even the slightest forms of imperfection.

“Depending on his mood, a stray cigarette butt on the carpet or an employee’s scuffed shoe could provoke a fearful tirade, always accompanied by a string of expletives. ... To image-obsessed Donald, a loosened tie was the sign of a sloppy mind.” In one particular episode, Trump was enraged by a limo driver who wore gray shoes with a dark suit, a mismatch that left Trump in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

The Republican nominee’s disgust with aesthetic blemishes (along with his documented tendency to evaluate women based on their physical appearance) might have been most evident in a scene O’Donnell describes in which Trump scraps a television advertisement producers had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing simply because one of the models—an incredibly beautiful brunette, according to O’Donnell—had a mole on her face. O’Donnell recalls Trump angrily barking, “Did you see that? Did you see that? I don’t believe this. She’s ugly! How could you do this? This is shit. This girl is a three for chrissakes! How could you have a girl with a face that’s flawed in my commercial?”

As particular and powerful as he was, Trump acknowledged that one thing wouldn’t succumb to his high standard. In his 1991 book Surviving at the Top, he writes, “My marriage, it seemed, was the only area of my life in which I was willing to accept something less than perfection.” (At the time Trump wrote the book, he was having an affair with Marla Maples, who would ultimately become his second wife.)

4. Sleep puts you at a disadvantage

Long before he dictated political news cycles with wee-hours tweets, Trump was a man who had trouble sleeping.

“I don’t sleep more than four hours a night,” he told Playboy in 1990.

“I’m a guy who lies awake at night and thinks and plots,” he said in 1992 in New York magazine.

At a campaign event in Springfield, Illinois, last year, Trump explained, “You know, I’m not a big sleeper. I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.”

While it might sound like a do-gooder from the nanny state Trump so detests, it is widely accepted health science that adults, even someone of Donald Trump’s exceptional capacities, need seven to nine hours of restful sleep in a 24-hour cycle. Trump, however, views his wakefulness as a competitive advantage.

“Don’t sleep any more than you have to,” he advised readers in 2004’s Think Like a Billionaire. “I have friends who are successful and sleep ten hours a night, and I ask them, ‘How can you compete against people like me if I sleep only four hours?’”

5. Hair is hugely important

For years, Donald Trump’s hair has been a source of public fascination. Reputable magazines from Rolling Stone to Men’s Health have devoted entire articles to the topic of Trump’s comb-over. The Republican nominee has also long been unflinchingly protective of his hair. Jimmy Fallon even asked to run his fingers through it when Trump visited the show recently, and Trump let him, which would definitely not have happened in the 1990s. During a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, Trump is reported to have had a Loro Piana cashmere sweater cut off him with scissors because he didn’t want to muss up his hair when the style director asked him to take the sweater off.

But Trump’s protectiveness of his hair may be more than a case of excessive vanity. Jack O’Donnell suggests in Trumped! that the Republican nominee has long considered baldness a sign of weakness. O’Donnell even quotes Trump as saying, “The worst thing a man can do is go bald.” In a 2011 interview on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Trump asserted that a person’s “look” is of utmost importance. Then Morgan tossed his guest a question as soft as a chinchilla pelt: "Well, it’s probably the most famous hair in America, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” Trump replied.

6. Asbestos ‘got a bad rap’

You don’t need the World Health Organization to tell you asbestos is nasty stuff. But if you do ask, the WHO will tell you 107,000 people a year die of asbestos-related cancers and diseases. Nevertheless, Trump managed to find reason to praise the substance. In his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, Donald Trump wrote:

“I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented. Millions of truckloads of this incredible fire-proofing material were taken to special ‘dump sites’ and asbestos was replaced by materials that were supposedly safe but couldn’t hold a candle to asbestos in limiting the ravages of fire.”

Mother Jones reported earlier this year that Trump believes asbestos is “100 percent safe, once applied” despite the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration declaring there to be “no safe level of asbestos exposure.”

Adding to his asbestos theory, Trump tweeted in 2012: “If we didn't remove incredibly powerful fire retardant asbestos & replace it with junk that doesn’t work, the World Trade Center would never have burned down.”

7. Isolated billionaires are people too

Howard Hughes, who died in 1976, was a famous billionaire who blended business interests in real estate, entertainment and aviation—but he’s remembered most for the OCD-fueled eccentricities and germophobia that consumed him toward the end of his life, making him a penthouse recluse who didn’t cut his hair or his nails, who ate only chocolate and chicken and drank only milk, who spent most of his time watching movies naked but for a napkin placed on his penis.

Trump has said he can relate.

“I find myself thinking more and more about Howard Hughes,” he wrote in 1990 in Surviving at the Top, “and even, to some degree, identifying with him.”

He added: “To many people today he symbolizes weirdness; he is probably doomed to be remembered as the guy with the long fingernails and the wild hair. That’s a shame, because here was a guy who at one time was movie-star handsome, a certified billionaire, and a genius in several fields. Hughes had it all, and judging by the number of beautiful ex-girlfriends who are still writing books about him, he seemed, for a while at least, to be living life to the hilt. Yet the pressure of being a larger-than-life figure was apparently so mind-boggling that it gradually drove him crazy.”

Something to keep an eye on.