Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and four years in office contained so much daily weirdness, wackiness, and horror that the human brain couldn’t comprehend it all. As Trump gets close to the White House again, “That Happened” brings you the surreal moments you may have forgotten — or blocked from your memory.
Steak temperatures aside, I respect Donald Trump’s diet. McDonald’s is good; eating KFC with a fork on a PJ is awesome. You may see Trump’s habits as revealing gluttony or a lack of curiosity about the culinary world; I see discipline. Besides, if you believe, as the former president does, that your body contains a finite store of energy and you die when it is depleted, why eat any other way?
Trump’s steadfast aversion to healthy eating — this is a man whose doctor had to hide vegetables in his food — is why I’m a little puzzled by his apparent lack of enthusiasm for, or familiarity with, sugary breakfast cereal.
This hole in his knowledge made itself known in 2018, when President Trump was upset after Democrats flipped the House. Naturally, he put the blame at least partly on made-up voter fraud. “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump told the Daily Caller. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
He went on to endorse more voter-ID laws as a solution to this nonexistent problem, backing up his argument with a strange claim: “If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID,” he said. “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”
As anyone who has ever purchased something at the store would know, this is not true. You can buy cereal without identification; you can buy any food that does not contain drugs without identification. Frosted Flakes make you feel good, but they are not regulated by a state cereal board.
There are two explanations for Trump’s cereal ignorance. The first, which is plausible, is that Trump is simply not a fan of the concept of morning dining in general. “Oftentimes I skip breakfast,” Trump told People in 2016. The second, also plausible, is that rich people do not understand how normal people live. This is a man who installed a button in the White House to have an underling to bring him Diet Coke at any waking hour.
Perhaps this is not the guy who should be cracking down on food-stamps programs. But then again, the Republican Party is not known for presidential candidates who know their way around grocery stores. On the campaign trail in 2011, Mitt Romney told a mid-Atlantic crowd that he was fascinated by the sandwich technology at Wawa. More famously, back in 1992, George H.W. Bush pronounced himself mesmerized by the food scanner at a grocery store. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he said of the checkout aisle. “Amazed by some of the technology.”
Trump does not appear to have learned too much in this department since his cereal comment: Last year, he repeated his claim that Americans need identification to buy groceries. And while he continues to chow down on fast food, it looks like he lets his people handle the small stuff like paying for it: At a recent campaign stop at a Chick-fil-A in Georgia, Trump ordered 30 milkshakes for the crowd, but walked off to let a lackey handle the business with the campaign credit card.
