Walrus

A rotund, deliberate authority figure of immense institutional weight.

At over 300 pounds, the heaviest president in American history, he embodied the walrus's defining trait: imposing physical mass deployed in service of institutional authority. Taft's true calling was never the presidency — a role he found exhausting — but rather the Supreme Court, where he served as Chief Justice and finally settled into his natural habitat of deliberate, methodical jurisprudence, much as the walrus commands its rocky shore with unhurried dominance. His famous admission that he always referred to the White House as "the loneliest place in the world" reveals a creature more comfortable within established hierarchical structures than in the chaotic arena of popular politics. Like the walrus, Taft projected gravitas, patience, and an almost immovable institutional weight that made him a formidable, if lumbering, pillar of the American establishment.