Trump as cyclist
Trump, apparently jealous of the introduction of Democrat Pete Buttigieg into the presidential conversation for 2028, tried to abash the former transportation secretary with a much-mocked attack in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday.
“He goes bicycling to work,” Trump said. “He takes a bicycle to work. Can you believe—he [was] running the biggest air system in the world, and he takes a bicycle to work. And they say he’s going to run for president. I don’t see it.”
It’s interesting that there is no photograph, no sketch, no courtroom rendering, not even a credible campfire story that places Donald J. Trump on a bicycle. Not as a grown man. Not as a child. Not even in the fabled, Photoshopped realm of satirical postcards. Multiple internet sleuths and journalists have noted the conspicuous absence of any such evidence. Trump has never been associated with bicycling, recreationally or for exercise. A man who has been in the public eye longer than most bridges, who has plastered his name on steaks, vodka, and synthetic universities, remains conspicuously absent from the humble realm of pedals and spokes.
This is no trivial omission. The bicycle—poor, earnest vehicle of balance and bruises—has long served as a political totem. Presidents, senators, and lesser mortals have mounted the saddle to project vigor, modesty, and terrestrial belonging. Obama rode one, helmeted like a PTA dad with dreams of wind power. George W. Bush famously tumbled off his mountain bike and laughed like a man who mistook gravity for a campaign strategist. Even Putin, that scowling maestro of staged virility, has at least flirted with the archetype by taming bears and swimming in Arctic lakes—bicycle adjacent, one might say. But Trump? Never. Not a wheel, not a chain, not a pant leg caught in a gear.
And there is reason. The bicycle is a machine of balance, of bodily reckoning. It requires risk, recovery, and the intimate knowledge that to move forward is to flirt, however briefly, with collapse. It is egalitarian, aerodynamic, and humbling. Which is to say: it is everything the President is not.
Trump avoids physical vulnerability the way he avoids subpoenas—with practiced indifference and occasional flights to Bedminster. A bicycle, unlike a golf cart, offers no grandeur. It is not gold-plated, nor does it accommodate sycophants. It sits low to the earth, whispering proletarian truths. No one has ever delivered a cease-and-desist letter from a ten-speed bike.
But there is something deeper, almost metaphysical, in his aversion. The bicycle is fluidity incarnate. It propels forward through one’s own effort, with no engine, no entourage. It is an act of trust in the laws of motion, a mobile confession that one is part of the world, not above it. And this, above all, offends. For Trump’s is a theology of height and haughtiness. He does not move; he is moved around. Escalators descend for him; elevators rise to greet him. His mythos demands that the world rotate beneath him like a luxury globe purchased tax-free.
He does not bicycle because to do so would suggest he might fall. Worse, that he might be laughed at. Or seen. Besides, Trump has stated in interviews and biographies (notably Trump Revealed by The Washington Post team) that he believes the human body is like a battery with finite energy and that unnecessary exertion depletes that store. He avoids traditional exercise for this reason, although he does golf frequently (with a cart). He believes exercise is a spiritual Ponzi scheme, as if cardio were a Deep State hoax funded by Pilates instructors.
He is a man who will never be caught pedaling through a park, panting modestly behind a Secret Service detail. He is not built for handlebars. His famously small hands cannot grasp such slender truths. His hair cannot withstand the headwind of humility.
And so, we watch others fall and rise again, spokes turning like the great wheel of civic fate. Meanwhile, the President remains unmoved, his feet never touching pedals, his journey a procession of gilded stillness through a democracy that keeps, against all odds, spinning without him.
One wonders, does he even know how to ride a bicycle?
