No fatties, libs, or poors: Trump's visa restrictions are garbage

The Trump administration sent a fun little missive to all our embassies and consulates on Nov. 6 with a fun little new directive: Please allow only the healthiest people to come to our shores. And make sure they’re not fatsos. Visa officers have been told they must consider a visa applicant’s health when mulling approvals, and the list of potentially disqualifying conditions is stupidly broad. “Certain medical conditions—including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases, neurological diseases, and mental health conditions—can require hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of care,” the statement reads. After visa officers have spelunked through an applicant’s medical information, they also have to get their mitts on some bank records and make sure the applicant has “adequate financial resources to cover the costs of such care over his entire expected lifespan without seeking public cash assistance or long-term institutionalization at government expense.” It’s not at all clear how a visa officer would figure out how much health care someone might need, and at what cost, for the rest of their lives. Related | In Trump’s world, only the whitest of the white qualify as refugees Extensive actuarial tables? Throwing a dart at a wall? Do applicants have to have that lifetime supply of money already in the bank, or do those random visa officers also need to predict the earning power of the sick weakling sitting before them? Do you only have to be moderately well off if you have diet-controlled diabetes, but need to have stacked a heroic amount of cash if you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? And as far as fat people? Well, the announcement helpfully explained that obesity can cause asthma, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure. Is the visa officer able to tell from looking at someone whether one day all that obesity will lead to another health condition? Maybe visa officers will just calculate an applicant’s body mass index when they walk in, just by sorta eyeballing them and taking a stab at height and weight. Or maybe they’ll install a scale, and applicants will have to hop on it before their appointment, just like at a doctor’s office? This vagueness is no doubt intentional, leaving a huge amount of discretion to approve or deny based on vibes and the size of someone’s bank account. Wouldn’t want to exclude a rich white person, right? So it’s not really no fatties. It’s no poor fatties. The notion that President Donald Trump, of all people, is demanding that only the fittest of the fit set foot on American soil is absurd. This is a guy who is crumbling in real time. His hand is a weird, bruised mess, so much so that even the White House seems to have abandoned the fiction that it was from shaking too many hands. He’s so out of it he couldn’t even rouse himself to help someone fainting just a few feet away during an Oval Office press conference. He bragged endlessly in October about how great his big brain was at taking tests, seemingly not realizing that the test was probably the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is used to identify dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, a test that takes about 10 minutes and includes such stumpers as, “Is this picture a horsey?” and “Can you draw a clock?” Trump, of course, does not need to worry that he would be labeled as obese, because he steadfastly ensures that his comical lies about height and weight don’t get undercut by actual doctors. You just know that somewhere in that cesspool he calls a brain, he thinks he actually looks jacked, like in his ridiculous foray into NFTs or the AI slop he loves to share. Meanwhile, sickly visa applicants can be rejected just like anyone whose social media shows “indications of hostility” toward the citizens, culture, or founding principles of the United States. Related | Speaking mildly ill of the dead is now punishable by deportation Given that Trump has the loosest grip imaginable on the founding principles of the country, it’s pretty obvious this is just a way to refuse entrance to anyone who hasn’t bought into the administration’s uniquely violent brand of white Christian nationalism. Also, if you’ve ever criticized our modern saint Charlie Kirk, you’re probably not getting in, as we’re already revoking visas for the crime of speaking mildly ill of the murdered conservative podcaster. It’s not just about being fit enough or loving Charlie Kirk enough. It’s also about having a lot of money, hence the new $100,000 price tag to get an H-1B visa. Did we mention that $100,000 is an annual fee, and not just a one-time catastrophic expense? Ideally, besides being rich and disease-free and thin, one should also be very racist, hence Trump’s new refugee policy which only lets in white Afrikaners from South Africa. This stuff is straight-up eugenics, which makes sense for an administration chock-full of skull-measuring enthusiasts just like Trump. And now he has the tools to bar the door against anyone he deems inferior.