Donald Trump‘s recent arrest in Atlanta has led to an interesting revelation about the former President: He’s built like a world-class athlete.

The 77-year-old Trump self-reported his height and weight at 6-foot-3, 215 pounds prior to his booking at Fulton County jail on Georgia on Thursday. That’s a dramatic improvement from the 6-foot-2, 240 pounds he claimed in April, when he was indicted in New York on allegations of falsifying business records.

By growing an inch and losing 25 pounds, Trump practically shares the same dimensions with Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, current heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and none other than Muhammad Ali.

In fact, Ali often weighed in around 215 throughout his career. ‘The Greatest’ was 213 when he scored a technical knockout over Cleveland Williams at Houston’s Astrodome in 1966 and a pound lighter in his next fight when he won a unanimous decision over Ernie Terrell.

By the time his rivalry with Joe Frazier began in 1971, Ali was fighting at exactly 215. However, as he got older and began focusing on absorbing body punches, Ali’s weight quietly crept above 225. In his last fight, a 1981 unanimous-decision defeat to Trevor Berbick, Ali tipped the scales at 236 – nearly as much as Trump claimed to weight five months ago.

Trump actually has the ideal weight for a 6-foot-3 senior citizen, according to the body-mass index published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

And that shouldn’t come as a surprise. A former high school football and baseball player at New York Military Academy in the early 1960s, Trump has boasted regularly about his athletic prowess.

‘When I was 17, I loved sports,’ Trump told MTV in 2010. ‘I was always a good athlete and I played football, baseball, soccer, and I wrestled. I think the thing I liked the best was baseball.’

Trump was so good, he claims, he could have played professionally.

‘I was captain of the baseball team,’ Trump said. ‘I was supposed to be a professional baseball player. Fortunately, I decided to go into real estate instead. I played first base and I also played catcher. I was a good hitter and I just had a good time. Now I play golf.’

Three years later, Trump boasted about his playing days on Twitter: ‘I played football and baseball, sorry, but said to be the best bball player in N.Y. State.’

Slate’s Leander Schaerlaeckens subsequently uncovered nine box scores from Trump’s high school games, during which he went 4 for 29 at the plate.

Trump said his baseball career was derailed when he attended a tryout with ‘another young kid named Willie McCovey.’ McCovey, the late Hall of Famer and legendary Giants slugger, was born in Alabama in 1938 – eight years before Trump was born in Queens.

Other athletes who share roughly the same body dimensions with Trump include Los Angeles Angels star Shohei Ohtani, St. Louis Cardinals slugger, Paul Goldschmidt, Texas Rangers pitcher Max Scherzer, Oklahoma City Thunder forward Luguentz Dort, and rookie Houston Texans quarterback CJ Stroud.

These days, Trump limits his physical gifts to the golf course, where he’s known for his powerful drives.

‘He can really strike the ball,’ PGA legend Ernie said after witnessing Trump sink a hole-in-one in 2022. ‘He makes good contact. He’s got a good swing. Like any amateur, you got to do the short game practice. I keep talking to him about his chipping. He’s a pretty good putter. Back in his day, he had to be a 4- or 5-handicap. Today, he’s probably a 10, 12.’

Trump has also played with the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Brooks Koepka, both of whom have complimented his game.

His ability as a golfer led caddies at one Westchester, New York club to liken him to one of the 20th century’s greatest athletes.

‘… the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: ‘Pele,’ Rick Reilly wrote in his 2019 book, ‘Commander in Cheat.’

A spectacular mountainous region of the United States will this week provide the setting for central bankers to ponder decisions that will help shape the global economy over the coming months.

Officials from institutions including the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank (ECB) will gather for the annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The meeting comes as the global battle against inflation enters a new phase and markets look for clues about where central banks go next after a series of interest rate hikes.

All eyes will be on Fed chairman Jerome Powell when he delivers a speech on the economic outlook on Friday.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, will also speak on Friday and Ben Broadbent, deputy governor of the Bank of England, takes the stage on Saturday.

Last year, Powell hammered home the Fed’s determination to get on top of inflation in a hawkish speech that promised to act ‘forcefully’ even as he acknowledged rate hikes would bring ‘some pain’ to households and businesses.

Today, the picture looks very different. Inflation in the US has fallen to 3.2pc – still above its 2pc target but much healthier than the 8.5pc level at the same time last year.

Europe has seen inflation fall too, while in the UK – though taking longer to tackle the price spiral – it has dropped to 6.8pc, from a peak of 11.1pc in October last year. Yet Powell is unlikely to be ready to declare victory.

Job numbers and the wider economy have not – until now – been hobbled in the way that many feared would need to happen to try to bring inflation down.

That will be welcome if it means a ‘soft landing’ – bringing inflation down without too many bumps.

But the worry is that signs of still strong wage growth and resilient consumer activity mean the inflation genie has not been entirely stuffed back into the bottle. It leaves rate-setters in a quandary about whether they should soon stop raising rates and how long they should remain there.

The wide-open prairies of the American West provide a suitably dramatic backdrop for the event, which runs from Thursday to Saturday.

In the past, film makers have taken advantage of the picturesque environs, shooting scenes for westerns such as Kevin Costner’s 1990 Oscar-winning blockbuster Dances With Wolves.

For central bankers it provides breathing space away from the hubbub of Washington, London and Frankfurt.

Neither US, UK or European officials have an imminent decision to make, with none of their next rate-setting meetings due until later next month.

But the market backdrop is tricky. Bond yields – the price investors charge for buying government debt – are rising amid growing expectations about interest rates staying higher for longer.

Andrew Hunter, deputy chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said mounting expectations of an ‘economic re-acceleration’ have set a ‘fraught backdrop’ ahead of Powell’s speech.

‘But with little evidence that stronger growth will threaten to reignite inflationary pressures, we don’t think there is any need for Powell to dust off his hawkish script from last year’s event,’ he added.

Ronald Temple, chief market strategist at asset manager Lazard, said: ‘Expect Powell to perform a balancing act of highlighting success to date in reducing headline inflation, while also acknowledging it’s too early to declare victory.’

Temple said Lagarde’s speech is also likely to be ‘straight down the middle of the fairway’, acknowledging that eurozone inflation at 5.3pc remains far too high but recognising that the ECB’s rate hikes so far ‘have not yet fully worked their way into the economy’.

Broadbent will focus on how UK real term incomes – how much people earn after the impact of inflation is taken into account – have changed, from the lead-up to the global financial crisis of 2008, to today.

It will include his views on inflation and the ‘second round’ effects – that is, when wages and prices rise in response, threatening a further spiral.

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at investment platform CMC Markets UK, said: ‘Markets have been chopping around for several weeks now on the basis that for all the Fed’s hawkish rhetoric, the central bank is close to, or even at the end of its rate hiking cycle.

‘The key question appears to be less about how much further will rate rise, but for how long they will stay at current levels.’

Michael Jackson molestation accuser Wade Robson set to head to trial with late singer’s corporation over claims was abused at Neverland Ranch when he was seven

By Adam S. Levy For Dailymail.com

Published: 21:16 EDT, 26 June 2023 | Updated: 21:54 EDT, 26 June 2023