You are what you eat.
—Victor Lindlahr
Donald J. Trump understood the politics of the dinner table better than any president since the Kennedys wowed Nobel laureates with haute cuisine and Lyndon Johnson seduced diplomats with Texas barbecue. But Trump took a different tack than his predecessors. He presented a lurid fast-food “banquet” in the White House, ate fine steaks broiled to a crisp and doused in ketchup, and eschewed vegetables other than the shredded iceberg lettuce in his taco bowls. He did not drink alcohol, but ordered up to a dozen Diet Cokes a day with the push of a button on the Resolute Desk. He used meals to brag, pressure, beg, humiliate, wallow in self-pity, and at least once hurtle cruise missiles at Syria while scarfing down chocolate cake. For him the table was an arena, and he liked to hold court.
This habit was on display in 2002, when Trump, a developer/reality TV star at the time, invited Chris Christie, then the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, to Jean-Georges, the four-star French restaurant in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Manhattan. When a waiter approached, Trump peremptorily ordered seared sea scallops and the roasted loin of lamb for his guest. To the unknowing, this might seem a generous gesture. It was not. “I’m allergic to scallops,” Christie later revealed. And “I’ve always hated lamb.” For Trump, the meal was a gleefully bullying display of dominance.
A similar scenario played out in January 2017, when Trump invited the FBI director, James Comey, to a private dinner shortly after moving into the White House. As they ate, the president pressured the G-man to pledge his “loyalty.” The FBI was in the midst of a criminal investigation of Russian meddling in the election, and Comey, shocked, pledged his “honesty” but not his fealty to the president. “The demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony—with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I had what it takes to be a ‘made man,’ ” Comey recalled.
Within days, Trump superannuated Comey and bragged to Russian officials, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia.”
Where does someone learn table manners befitting King Henry VIII?
Donald Trump acquired his at his parents’ four-thousand-square-foot brick McMansion that dominates a hilltop in Queens, New York. As you passed through a library with no books, you descended into a basement bar decorated with “wooden Indians”—carved figures used to advertise tobacco in the nineteenth century, now considered a racist stereotype. The bar was outfitted with stools and dusty glasses but not a drop of alcohol. The patriarch, Fred Trump, didn’t drink. Nor did he have hobbies, enjoy food, or socialize much. He was consumed by the accumulation of wealth and equated kindness with weakness.
His wife, Mary Anne Trump, was a self-dramatizing woman who styled her orange-tinted hair in an elaborate coiffure. She suffered years of ill health and was an insomniac who wandered the halls “at all hours like a soundless wraith,” wrote her granddaughter, Mary Trump, the daughter of the Trumps’ oldest son, Freddy Trump Jr., and now a clinical psychologist. Mary Anne was “emotionally and physically absent,” she wrote, and the Trump children “were essentially motherless.”
Given these baroque surroundings, it is not surprising that dining was a fraught subject for the family. In elementary school, Donald lobbed hunks of birthday cake at other kids, and he once annoyed his older brother so much that Freddy dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on Donald’s head.
Their dinners usually featured red meat and a starch, with few greens or fruits. One of Donald’s favorite things to eat was “my mother’s meat loaf,” a dish that represented more than homely comfort food: it seemed to hold totemic powers for him and to represent an idyllic, all-American upbringing he never had. (Nixon and Reagan were also meat-loaf-loving presidents.) The family recipe was a standard mix of ground beef, bread crumbs, two eggs, garlic, onion, and peppers, which the maid who did their cooking slathered in tomato sauce and baked at 350 degrees. In Trump’s hands, the humble hamburger log became a tool of self-promotion—he noted that on the menu at Mar-a-Lago was “Mrs. Trump’s Meatloaf,” “the best meatloaf in America,” and pretended to make meat loaf with Martha Stewart on television—and a weapon.
In February 2017, he invited Chris Christie for lunch at the White House. Shortly after the election, Trump had abruptly fired Christie as the head of his transition team and replaced him with Vice President Mike Pence (a move said to have been orchestrated by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, after Christie sent his father, Charles Kushner, to jail in a sordid tax evasion case). Nevertheless, Christie remained eager to play a role in the new administration, and, as he recalled on a sports radio show, Trump said to their tablemates, “ ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’ ”
“We’re going to have the meatloaf?” Christie replied, nonplussed.
“I’m telling you, the meatloaf is fabulous,” Trump said.
“It’s emasculating” to have someone tell you what to eat, the show’s host interjected.
“No it’s not,” Christie snapped. But it was, as Trump made clear when he did not offer Christie a meaningful job or a shred of self-dignity. (Eventually, he put Christie in charge of a bipartisan opioid commission.)
Mary Anne Trump did not like the kitchen, ate little, and hardly said a word at the table. Fred Sr. liked everyone to be well dressed and well mannered and taught his children that “the person with the power (no matter how arbitrarily that power was conferred or attained) got to decide what was right and wrong,” wrote Mary Trump.
Her grandfather systematically “dismantled” her father, Freddy, who chose to work as a TWA pilot rather than in the family real estate business. His career, marriage, and life dissolved in a haze of booze and tobacco smoke, and he died at forty-two from a heart attack. Freddy would have made “an amazing peacemaker if he didn’t have the problem, because everybody loved him,” Donald said. “He’s like the opposite of me.” Watching his brother suffer, Trump avoided cigarettes or even “a drop” of alcohol and molded himself into the kind of preening tough guy his father admired.
Aboard his campaign plane, Trump Force One, the candidate’s “four major food groups” were McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke, according to the campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The press dubbed Trump “the Fast Food President,” a moniker he happily embraced. “I think fast food’s good,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going to [Wendy’s] than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from.”
He appears to have a lust- and/or fear-based relationship to food, much like his relationship to women, and would go for long periods without eating, then gorge on steak, gallons of Diet Coke, and wedges of cake. He’d daintily eat pizza and fried chicken with a knife and fork, so as not to sully his hands, and avoided pizza crust or hamburger buns, to “keep the weight down at least as good as possible,” but had no problem scarfing down two large scoops of ice cream while offering guests just one scoop.
Lewandowski claimed Trump did not eat burger buns and had the stamina of an Olympian: “He would go and work 14 or 16 or 18 hours a day and not eat because he was so focused like a professional athlete.”
Nutritionists and foodies were aghast at Trump’s unhealthy, proudly unrefined diet. His standard order at the Golden Arches was two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate milkshake—estimated by dieticians to be a 2,630-calorie bomb. His foods were larded with sugar, salt, and fat, which can lead to obesity, heart stress, diabetes, and cancers. Poor diet is reportedly the leading cause of poor health in the United States now, resulting in half a million deaths per year.
When Trump took the presidential oath in January 2017, he was seventy years and 220 days old, eclipsing Reagan as the oldest president in history to that point. He ate fitfully, flew into rages, and tweeted at all hours of the night. He stood six feet three, or six two, or maybe six one, depending on your source, and weighed either 239 pounds or 243 pounds (which qualified him as obese). His personal physician, Harold Bornstein, called him “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” but refused to disclose Trump’s medical records and later admitted that the president had dictated that assessment.
Yet Trump’s philistine diet was an essential part of his appeal. His oldest son, Don Jr., extolled his father as a “blue-collar billionaire,” saying, “He is able to talk to those people. He’s not talking at them. He’s talking with them.”
Trump had a shrewd insight—or, as he put it, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” What his gut told him was that we live in a visual era, and food is an important aspect of image making. Just as Reagan used jelly beans to connect with his voters, so Trump posed for photographs with pizza, fried chicken, and taco bowls (“I love the Hispanics!” he tweeted), which conveyed a political message to his base: “I like the same food you do, so vote for me.” And, say what you will, it was highly effective.
On January 14, 2019, at a White House “banquet” for the Clemson University Tigers, who had won the NCAA football championship, “President McDonald Trump”—as Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) called him—conjured up an impossible-looking sight. Dressed in his usual white shirt, extra-long red tie, and black jacket, Trump stood before a groaning table of fast food—ziggurats of McDonald’s Quarter Pounders; stacks of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches; chicken wraps from Wendy’s; fries from Burger King; pizzas from Domino’s; hundreds of packets of ketchup and sauces—in the State Dining Room, as if it were a state dinner, or a satire of one.
Giving the spectacle a truculent, anarchic edge, the greasy burgers were plopped on sterling silver trays, wilting fries sagged in paper cups embossed with the presidential seal, McNugget sauce pods were stuffed in antique silver gravy boats, plastic salad bowls teetered on venerable tureens, and the spread was framed by golden candelabra holding tall white tapers.
It was an image never seen before: a hungry child’s fever dream, a grotesque affront to Washington traditionalists of both parties, a calculated middle finger to the “global elites.” The tableau was designed for the cameras, and was so outrageous that it went viral, was seared into the collective mind, and stirred disbelief around the world.
With hardly a nod to the Clemson footballers, Trump posed before the burger banquet with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln over his shoulder—an image designed to connect him to a populist America of fast food, football, and Honest Abe. When Trump said he had paid $5,500 for the meal (it actually cost $2,911.44, The Washington Post calculated), the subtext was clear: he expected to be repaid with adulation and support. “We went out and we ordered American fast food, paid for by me,” he declared. “If it’s American, I like it….Lots of hamburgers, lots of pizza…Many, many French fries—all of our favorite foods.”
The reason Trump had paid for the banquet was that he had instigated a government shutdown, which furloughed thousands of federal workers, including the kitchen crew and waitstaff. Observers wondered why he hadn’t catered the banquet from the Trump International Hotel, down the street, but they missed the point: it wasn’t about the food, or the Clemson players (trained athletes who seemed nonplussed by the unhealthy meal, and who said, “Our nutritionist must be having a fit”); it was about Donald Trump.
A Twitter user mocked him for turning “the White House into a White Castle.” And The Atlantic called the banquet “a little bit P. T. Barnum, a little bit Hieronymus Bosch, a little bit Beauty and the Beast, had ‘Be Our Guest’ been staged by Willy Wonka and also set in the apocalypse.”
But it was a trap. Trump’s allies declared that any critique of the banquet was “elitist,” while Quartz magazine tut-tutted, “The media comes across as a pack of mean girls by obsessing over Trump’s fast food bonanza….[U]ltimately, they got played by his mastery of spectacle.” The critics’ howls just elevated Trump’s image and amplified his message: “I like the same food you do, so vote for me.”
The president had divined something primordial: we humans are wired to feel kinship with people who like to eat the same things we do. Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago, has found that when people see others wearing similar clothes, they don’t feel a special bond, but when they see others eating foods they enjoy, they infer that “people who eat similar foods are probably friends.” We “don’t use other cues in the same way as food,” she told the Gastropod podcast. “If I see you eating the food that I’m eating, I think that, oh, we have something in common.” The reasons behind this are mysterious, but are probably a holdover from a time when hunting and gathering was a tribal effort.
The only vegetable Donald Trump admitted to liking was iceberg lettuce. He had it sliced thin on top of his burger or shredded in his taco bowl. Best of all, he liked a wedge salad, a classic retro dish from the Mad Men era, made with a head of iceberg cut into quarters and slathered with a blue cheese dressing, bacon, tomatoes, and chives. It complements a steak nicely. Not coincidentally, steak was perhaps Trump’s favorite food.
In Washington, a city with a vibrant food scene, the only restaurant he ate at was BLT Prime by David Burke, the steak house in Trump’s hotel. His standard order was a dry-aged New York strip that cost $54, cooked very well done, and drowned in ketchup. When aficionados learned that he had his beautiful cut so seared into charcoal that it “rocked on the plate,” as Trump’s butler Anthony Senecal put it, they cursed him as a vulgarian.
How well a steak is cooked is a deeply personal choice, and Trump’s preference was revealing. The more meat is cooked, the more the juices, texture, and flavor are eliminated: too little cooking, and a steak is nearly indigestible; too much, and it becomes as leathery as the boot Charlie Chaplin gnawed on in The Gold Rush. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. “Steaks with even a little bit of red in them are better than steaks without,” opined the food writer Helen Rosner. “This is a fact, a chemical and physical truth, the result of an alchemy of fat and protein and salt…and the way our bodies connect the chemicals of taste to the chemicals of pleasure.” In Trump’s desiccated protein, Rosner discerned “an aversion to risk, which is at its core an unwillingness to trust the validity and goodwill of any experience beyond the limited sphere of one’s own. It is…a confession of a certain timidity, a defensiveness, an insecurity…a choice to…reject the very premise that expertise outside his person can have value. A person who won’t eat his steak any doneness but well is a person who won’t entertain the notion that there could be a better way.”
Making matters infinitely worse for the purists, Trump drowned his steak in ketchup, in an effort to return some of the juicy flavor that had been cooked out of it. Nick Solares, a “professional carnivore,” declared that ketchup should never touch a good piece of meat: “Why on earth would someone choose to cover up such a carefully crafted…prime beef with such a sweet, overpowering condiment?”
Ketchup is the nation’s favorite sauce, a “quintessentially American” foodstuff, explained Amy Bentley, a food historian at New York University. It is prized as quick, tasty, affordable, consistent, and clean—all attributes that appealed to Donald Trump. The condiment originated in China as ke-tsiap or ke-tchup, a fermented fish sauce that was carried around the world by seventeenth-century British sailors. A version of the sauce—which mixed tomatoes with vinegar, sugar, shallots, anchovies, and spices—gained popularity in nineteenth-century America, where it jazzed up bland stews and inferior cuts of meat. By the early twentieth century, the H. J. Heinz Company had devised a formula that balanced salty, sour, and umami notes. The secret to Heinz’s success is how sweet the recipe is: the modern version contains four grams of sweetener (usually high-fructose corn syrup) per tablespoon, which is a lot. Ketchup pairs beguilingly with proteins and starches, and soon Heinz was selling five million bottles a year. With mass production, the red goo evolved into a “class leveler,” Bentley said, that 97 percent of Americans slather on everything from chicken fingers to clam strips, scrambled eggs, and even salad. Today, ten billion ounces of ketchup are sold every year, and it has leaked into Swedish, Japanese, and French cuisine.
Ketchup remained a leitmotif throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, but after he left office it occasionally haunted him. During a June 2022 House committee hearing about the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol Building, the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that on several occasions she’d witnessed Trump throw dishes, or “flip the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor.” Most graphically, she recounted the day the president—in a fit of rage at Attorney General Bill Barr, who had dismissed Trump’s false claims of election fraud—had “thrown his lunch against the wall” in the dining room next to the Oval Office. “There was ketchup dripping down the wall,” she said. “And there’s a shattered porcelain plate on the floor.” It was an alarming moment, one that recalled the cake-throwing tantrums of Trump as an elementary schoolboy.
Donald Trump’s diet might have been popular, but it wasn’t healthy. His pattern of abstinence followed by gorging on fast food stimulated a cycle of instant satisfaction (a high) followed by a plunge in blood sugar levels (a low), which triggers lethargy and craving for more.
Food scientists have capitalized on the fact that humans are wired to seek energy-rich substances to fill our bellies with. They have engineered junk foods to hit the “bliss point,” the perfect combination of sweet, salty, fatty flavors that our lizard brains crave. When empty calories are processed into sugary additives such as high-fructose corn syrup, they enhance the flavor of food, but they also release dopamine, the “feel good” hormone. One tablespoon of HFCS contains fifty-three calories, 14.4 grams of carbohydrates, and 5 grams of sugar. Even seemingly healthy products—such as pasta sauce or light beer—contain as many artificial sweeteners as rich desserts.
In a 2013 study, researchers found that sugar and salt are addictive in lab rats. “Salt is extremely addictive, just as much as sugar,” Nia Rennix, a clinical nutritionist, found. “The manufacturers…continue to add salt to foods because they want you to continue to purchase” their products. The more salt ingested, the more water your body retains, and the higher your blood pressure gets. And the more of it you ingest, the more you crave it. This strains the heart, brain, and arteries.
In 2020, just one in five American adults was “metabolically healthy,” according to a report issued on the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon’s 1969 Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. Poor metabolic health impairs immunity and underlies type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity-related cancers. As a result, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, of Tufts University, “only 12 percent of Americans are without high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or pre-diabetes.”
Why is this important? Because the president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world and his words and actions have tremendous consequences. When Trump modeled unhealthy eating, people followed suit. A 2018 survey of 1,050 adults concluded that his fast-food diet increased the likelihood that Americans—both Republicans and Democrats—would order Whoppers. People who pay more attention to media coverage of President Trump’s diet are more likely to view fast food as a “socially acceptable meal option” and are more likely to intend to eat fast food, said the study’s author, Jessica Gall Myrick, an associate professor of media studies at Pennsylvania State University. Republicans were nearly twice as likely to “report positive attitudes toward fast food than are Democrats,” she found. The data suggested that “there could be harm caused to public health by encouraging many Americans to eat fast food.”
When COVID-19 swept the globe in 2020, the nation’s underlying health problems made millions of Americans extra vulnerable to the pandemic—perhaps even President Trump, who contracted the virus in October 2020.
First Lady Melania Trump, meanwhile, kept to the light, healthy diet she had relied on since working as a fashion model in Slovenia. She began her day with a green smoothie—“my every day delicious & healthy breakfast”—which included blueberries, apples, celery, carrots, and spinach blended with apple and orange juice, fat-free yogurt, olive oil, flax seeds, vitamin D, and omega-3 supplements. A Sausage McMuffin it was not.
The First Lady was not a fan of diets, saying, “I just like to eat healthy because I feel better and have more energy.” She even had the common sense to add, “It’s good to indulge cravings and your taste once in a while, as long as you balance those things with healthy foods.” (Many nutritionists agree that occasional treats help dissuade people from unhealthy binging.) For her that meant the odd piece of dark chocolate—which, in moderation, can reduce stress and improve heart health—or a small helping of ice cream. She was not above the occasional Whataburger, or sip of Diet Coke, though she insisted it be served in a glass bottle (Coca-Cola claims it tastes better that way). Melania’s words and eating habits were a counterbalance, of sorts, to her husband’s.
Though she did not mention her predecessor by name, Melania tacitly acknowledged the popularity of Michelle Obama’s garden by posing with Swiss chard, peas, and a group of children there. “I’m a big believer in eating healthy because it reflects your mind and your body,” Mrs. Trump said. “Eat a lot of vegetables and fruits so you grow up healthy.”
Her husband joked he would turn the garden into a putting green, but didn’t, in part because the Obamas had reinforced it with stone, steel, and cement and secured $2.5 million in funding from the Burpee home-gardening company to ensure it was maintained by the National Park Service.
When Donald Trump arrived in Washington, he dismissed the city as a “swamp,” called the Executive Mansion “a dump,” and began a search to replace Cristeta Comerford as executive chef. David Burke and about a dozen other big-shot cooks were asked, but none of them were available. The search fizzled. “I don’t know a chef in their right mind who would cook in this White House,” quipped Dan Barber, the chef at Blue Hill, voicing what many of his colleagues were thinking.
The Trumps rarely acknowledged Comerford in the way the Bushes and Obamas had. On one tragicomic occasion the president asked her to re-create a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese and a baked apple pie. When her attempt “couldn’t match the satisfaction” of a real McBurger, an insider said, Trump dispatched his body man, the former New York cop Keith Schiller, to fetch the genuine articles from a franchise on K Street. Many chefs in Comerford’s position would have quit in disgust, as René Verdon had done when LBJ insisted he make garbanzo bean puree. But Comerford stayed. I was not allowed to speak to her, and mutual acquaintances said she remained on the job because she was devoted to the White House, was nonpartisan, and had a family to provide for.
Though he kept up a steady pace of modest congressional lunches and the like, Trump hosted only two state dinners in four years. He didn’t care for the formality, and complained, “We should be eating a hamburger on a conference table. We should make better deals with China and others and forget the state dinners.”
Even so, he occasionally entertained guests in his own peculiar way. When he hosted China’s president, Xi Jinping, for lunch at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2017, for instance, the menu paid no heed to the guest nation, as is customary. Instead, lunch was a classic Trumpian surf and turf: pan-seared Dover sole followed by dry-aged prime New York strip steak. As they ate dessert—“the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”—the president opened a laptop full of state secrets in front of the Chinese leader and with the push of a button launched fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria (which he misidentified as Iraq). Afterward, Trump seemed more impressed by Xi’s clean plate than by the destruction he had wrought. “It was a full day….We’re almost finished, and…what does he do? Finish his dessert and go home,” Trump said admiringly.
Eventually, he agreed to host a couple of state dinners, probably with cajoling from the First Lady, the National Security Council (which is responsible for recommending honorees), the State Department, and donors who wanted to be invited to a White House dinner. The first one, in April 2018, honored Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Comerford’s menu included seasonal specialties and a gracious nod to our oldest ally—young lettuces with a goat cheese gâteau; rack of lamb with jambalaya, Carolina Gold rice, and a burned-onion soubise (sauce); and a nectarine tart with ice cream for dessert. The dinner was served on china with the George W. Bush and Clinton patterns.
Connoisseurs wondered if Trump would serve bottles from the Trump Winery, in Virginia. (The teetotaling president had bought the former Kluge estate out of foreclosure for $6.2 million in 2011 and put his son Eric in charge.) But Macron was served an American Chardonnay made with French grapes and aged in French oak, and a Pinot Noir grown “with French soul, Oregon soil.” To gastro-detectives, such thoughtful touches indicated the menu was dotted by Melania’s fingerprints.
The meeting was hailed as “le bromance,” but when Trump called NATO “obsolete,” imposed 25 percent tariffs on European wine, and joked that he would send “some nice ISIS fighters” to France, Macron confronted the president on live television, and le bromance was fini.
Trump’s second state dinner, held in September 2019, was for the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison—a pro-coal, anti-immigration conservative who was happy to smile silently as Trump ranted about the “Russia hoax.” Their negotiators discussed America’s trade war with China and Pacific Rim security, and the menu—ravioli, Dover sole, squash blossoms, apple tart—was standard, if light, Trump fare. Melania, it seems, had taken the night off. The two leaders toasted to “a hundred years of mateship, and a hundred more.” (The event was not technically a state dinner, because the prime minister led the Australian government, not the state itself.)
Trump’s third state dinner was slated for April 2020, for Spain’s King Felipe VI, but he was spared the ordeal when the COVID-19 virus canceled the royals’ visit, the White House Easter Egg Roll (for the first time since 1948–52), and most other White House events.
In mid-January 2020, an American man in his thirties flew from Wuhan, China, to Seattle, Washington, carrying what is believed to be the first identified case of the COVID-19 virus in the United States. (There is some evidence that the first case arrived earlier.) The virus rapidly spread across the country and cascaded into the worst global pandemic in a century.
The history and mechanisms of the coronavirus remain murky. Some have posited that the virus leaked from a state virology lab, though China denies it, and epidemiologists are increasingly convinced that it originated in food: specifically, at a marketplace in Wuhan, a city of eleven million in central-eastern China. In a musty “wet market,” live animals—including bats, snakes, civets, pangolins, dogs, birds, and other creatures destined to be turned into meals—were caged tail by jowl. It was a perfect vector point for disease. The prevailing theory is that in November 2019 COVID-19 jumped from bats or pangolins to humans somewhere near Wuhan and began to multiply.
As the pandemic spread and sickened or killed people, it exposed just how vulnerable the global food system was. Supply chains were ruptured, stores and restaurants were closed, and millions of people went hungry. In the United States, the virus revealed that a handful of large companies had taken control of food production, cut costs, and reduced government oversight. The result was catastrophic.
By late April 2020, nearly sixty-five hundred workers at meat processing plants had been infected, and at least twenty had died, while more than a hundred government meat inspectors were stricken. Dairy farmers had no choice but to tip spoiling milk into their fields, while poultry and hog farmers were forced to sell or kill off their livestock to avoid overcrowded pens. Farming is uncertain in the best of times, but cutting food stores and herds added exponential stress. “It tore me up enough, even though I tried to block it out,” the Minnesota farmer Todd Selvik said, after euthanizing five hundred healthy pigs. “It really kind of just messes with you.”
Big Meat companies such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef Packing began to shutter plants. Alarmed, Trump designated meat processing part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure” and invoked the Defense Production Act to force them to remain open. This put a spotlight on the fact that most employees of those plants were migrants or immigrants.
It was an open secret that Trump—who suggested digging moats filled with alligators or building a Great Wall on the Mexican border to deter immigrants—relied on undocumented workers at his properties. When this was publicized in 2019, the Trump Organization fired dozens of employees. But at the Trump Winery undocumented harvesters were kept on through the fall—working sixty-hour weeks picking grapes at night so the sun wouldn’t shrink them—then let go before the 2020 election. Trump “waits until the fields are tended, grapes picked, wine made,” said the immigration lawyer Anibal Romero. Then “discards [the workers] like a used paper bag. Happy New Year—you’re fired.”
Restaurants were particularly hard-hit by the pandemic. A report by the Pew Research Center found that in 2008 undocumented workers made up at least 10 percent of the hospitality industry and 13 percent of the agricultural industry. In 2008, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that more than 20 percent of restaurant cooks were undocumented. Based on anecdotal evidence, those numbers seem conservative. But as armed and amped Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept in to cart workers away, restaurateurs faced a Hobson’s choice: either fire their undocumented staff or face government prosecution.
The COVID crisis and Trump’s harsh policies led to soul-searching in the food community: What, people wondered, is the role of a restaurant in the twenty-first century?
Humans are social animals who strongly respond to the communal aspects of dining out. Since the opening of Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau’s Paris consommé shop in the 1760s, people have gathered in restaurants for sustenance and succor. They provide food and fellowship, and that communality breeds shared values that ultimately strengthen the democracy.
All of that was upended in the summer of 2018, when Trump’s rhetoric grew hateful and occasionally boomeranged against his deputies. When Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, ate at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, she was heckled by people shouting, “Do you hear the babies crying?…How can you enjoy a Mexican dinner as you’re deporting and imprisoning tens of thousands of people?!” Nielsen was driven out of the restaurant, and later her job.
Most controversially, Trump’s spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen, a farm-to-table restaurant in rural Virginia, in June 2018. The co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson felt it was “the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable…decisions to uphold their morals.” Several of her staff identified as LGBT and felt stung by Trump’s ban of transgender military troops and the Supreme Court’s ruling that a Christian baker did not have to work for a gay couple. Wilkinson politely asked Sanders to leave the restaurant; she did so, and her group was not charged for their food. But then pro-LGBTQ supporters and armed Trumpists squared off in front of the Red Hen. The president tweeted the restaurant was “filthy” (he had never been there), while the Democratic representative Maxine Waters encouraged people to tell Trumpers “they’re not welcome.” Right-wing activists posted Wilkinson’s home address online, saying, “Go after her children.”
The politics of food and the food of politics had collided.
The case ignited an argument over civility. By denying Sanders a seat, some asked, wasn’t Wilkinson a hypocrite? What if a Christian restaurateur asked the LGBTQ spokesperson for a Democratic president to leave his establishment—what then? There were no easy answers. The Washington Post editorialized that the Trumpers “should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think…how many Americans might find their own special moment….Down that road lies a world in which only the most zealous sign up for public service.” Eater countered, “How can a space be open and welcoming to all if it invites people who are the antithesis of those values?”
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik opined, “Nothing is more fundamental to human relations than deciding who has a place at the table—and nothing is more essential to our idea of humanism than expanding that table….[But] [t]he Trump Administration is…all about an assault on civility.” Because Sanders chose to amplify Trump’s message, she deserved to be barred: “You cannot spit in the plates and then demand your dinner. The best way to receive civility at night is to not assault it all day long. It’s the simple wisdom of the table.”
One day in November 2019, I had tea with Lea Berman, George W. Bush’s social secretary. She was a staunch Republican, but candid about her distaste for the man who had taken over the GOP. With long, sculpted dirty-blond hair, deep blue eyes, and an open face, she struck me as someone quite different from the harridan-in-Versace depicted by the chef Walter Scheib. A shy girl raised on an isolated grape farm in Ohio, Berman had learned to deflect criticism and to mollify those who disagreed with her in Washington. After leaving government, she coauthored Treating People Well, a book about “the power of civility,” with Jeremy Bernard, the Obamas’ openly gay social secretary. “The personal smooths the professional,” they said. “Getting to know each other” and “attentive listening” help persuade “people to do what we want them to do.”
I was alert to Berman’s charm but found her sensible. The ability to “disagree agreeably” is essential to the smooth functioning of Washington, she said. “Bad behavior is contagious. But it is empowering to be polite and civil. When leaders get to know each other…it opens better communications, makes you feel differently about yourself, makes life much less stressful. It’s actually in your self-interest to treat people well. It’s glaringly obvious, and it’s something most presidents have grasped.”
But not Donald Trump, whose three rules of conduct, she said, were “when you’re right, you fight; controversy elevates the message; and never apologize.”
When I asked about the mood in Washington, Berman sighed, and said, “I’ve never seen the fury expressed so openly before. It has really shocked me.”
A former party planner and food blogger, Berman now runs an animal rescue foundation. She found Trump’s boorishness “offensive” and offered this illustration: when Laura Bush arranged for presidential historians to tour the Lincoln Bedroom, they were so moved it nearly brought them to tears. But such hospitality would “never occur to Donald Trump.” Instead, when he toured plutocrats through the Lincoln Bedroom, he pointed to a copy of the Gettysburg Address and a rug donated by Ronald Reagan, saying, “Have you ever seen luxury like this?”
Another thing that rankled Berman was that Trump was “just not interested” in participating in the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Kennedy Center Honors, and other hallowed Washington rituals. When it came to entertaining, she noted, Trump was equally obtuse. “People tend to forget that it’s very intimidating to visit the White House, particularly for foreign visitors. Part of making it a good experience is to put them at ease so you can be more successful in your negotiations. Make them feel positive so they go home thinking, ‘This is my friend.’ But that’s all been lost.”
When I asked if traditional Republicans felt betrayed by Trump, Berman’s eyes flashed sharply as she said, “He’s a radical. He stands for everything we are not. We almost hate him more than the Democrats do.” Pensively sipping her tea, she added, “People feel demoralized. There’s a whole group who don’t go out anymore. I’m one of them. We get invited to the White House, but I just…can’t.”
As we prepared to leave, Berman sadly said, “When you visit President Trump’s White House, he gives you fast-food burgers…which is most unfortunate.” Then, in a rising voice, she added, “But there’s also a White House tradition of civility. It was developed over many years. By people from both sides of the aisle. It is important to them, and for continuity at the White House. It’s important. And when he leaves, it will return again.”