You are what you eat
Why Donald Trump loves his junk food,
U.S. President Barack Obama is so disciplined that his wife has teased that he eats precisely seven lightly salted almonds each night.
George W. Bush was an exercise buff, obsessed with staying trim by mountain biking and clearing brush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
But Donald Trump is taking a different approach: A junk food aficionado, he is hoping to become the nation’s fast food president.
“A ‘fish delight,’ sometimes, right?” Trump told Anderson Cooper at a CNN town-hall-style meeting, extolling the virtues of McDonald’s. “The Big Macs are great. The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff.”
Trump’s presidential campaign is improvised, undisciplined, rushed and self-indulgent. And so is his diet. On social media, he has broadcast his culinary preferences to the nation — devouring a bucket of KFC (while reading the Wall Street Journal), feasting on a McDonald’s bur- ger and fries (to celebrate clinching the Republican presidential nomination) and chowing down on a taco bowl (in an effort to woo Hispanic voters).
He is a lover of diner fare and fast food and the bland nourishment of Americana. In an era of gourmet dining and obsession with healthy ingredients, he’s a throwback to an earlier, more carefree time, when nobody bothered to ask if the tomatoes were locally grown. But his highbrow, lowbrow image — of the jetsetting mogul who takes buckets of fried chicken onto his private plane with the gold-plated seat belt buckles — is also a carefully crafted one.
“There’s nothing more American and more of-the-people than fast food,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist and ad maker.
Or, as Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster on the Trump campaign, put it, “It goes with his authenticity.
“I don’t think Hillary Clinton would be eating Popeye’s biscuits and fried chicken,” she said.