The Donald Trump diet: 12 diet cokes, two filet-o-fish — and eight full hours of rage

You are what you eat — and the US President has a supersized fast food habit.  Richard Godwin puts the Donald Trump diet to the test
Richard Godwin12 December 2017

Authority, noted the great political theorist Hannah Arendt, does not simply flow from a leader’s personal qualities. It flows from the willingness of others to grant that leader respect and legitimacy.

What sort of respect and legitimacy am I granting Donald Trump, I wondered, as I jabbed at a McDonald’s self-service touch-screen in a retail park by a ring road yesterday lunchtime. I was ordering the “Full Donald”, as outlined in Let Trump Be Trump, an account of the fateful 2016 American presidential campaign by Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, two former campaign managers. I had hoped that copying Trump’s inexplicable McDonald’s order — two Filets-o-Fish, two Big Macs, one chocolate milkshake — might give me fresh insights into the toxic chasm of his mind.

But if my normally sunny disposition was beginning to cloud over — thoughts of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism beginning to mask the Ariana Grande on the McDonald’s stereo — well, I was also trying to match the Commander-in-Chief’s appalling drinking habits too. Alcohol? No, never, thanks to the warnings of Trump’s late alcoholic brother, Fred (“I’ve never had a drink, and I have no longing for it. I have no interest in it”). But we can thank the indefatigable New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for the stunning insight that Trump drinks 12 cans (ie four litres) of Diet Coke every day. That’s 525 mg of caffeine. Doctors recommend no more than 400mg. I was already three cans in.

Haberman consulted 60 Trump insiders to gain this and other choice insights into the least popular US President in modern history. He gets up at 5.30am and immediately watches CNN, Fox News and Morning Joe — the last on the slightly left of centre MSNBC so as to fire himself up for another day of annoying liberals.

Even after a year in America, I find it hard to watch this stuff: the frenzied show trials, the seven-way shout-fests, the hallucinatory adverts for pharmaceuticals and litigators. Trump watches between four and eight hours of this per day. Whereupon: “Energised, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr Trump grabs his iPhone. Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides. Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television...”

After two hours watching Fox News anchors getting annoyed about the FBI doing its job and failing to get annoyed about the fact that the Republicans are trying to elect an alleged paedophile to the Alabama Senate seat, I too was “energised” and “infuriated”. I might even lob “despairing” and “ready to try Communism now” into that particular gumbo. (Mmm gumbo.) Eschewing Twitter, the only touchscreen I was prodding was in McDonald’s. The interface was slow and unresponsive, almost as if the automated future was gently dissuading me from placing such an idiotic order.

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Four burgers and a shake is a terrible deal: £14.50. You could eat at TGI Fridays for that! And Trump claims to be in touch with ordinary voters. Healthwise the Full Donald is 2,250 calories, which is about the recommended daily intake for a man Trump’s age (71). But that’s no biggie for Trump who has “magic genes”.

His doctor of 35 years, Jacob Bornstein, endorsed this: “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary!” Which is great as he also likes to eat well-done steaks (“It would rock on the plate, it was so well done,” according to his former butler) and supplements his McDonald’s with KFC, Burger King and Domino’s. On the campaign trail, it would be served on silver trays. “It goes with his authenticity,” his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway once boasted.

Trump disdains exercise too, believing that humans only have a finite amount of energy like a battery, so why waste it running on a treadmill, duh? When he learned one of his casino executives was training for a triathlon, he admonished him: “You are going to die young because of this.”

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Still, you couldn’t accuse him of not being health conscious. He takes an aspirin each day to thin his blood and statins to control his cholesterol. It’s Diet Coke after all. And note the avoidance of French fries. Trump also once boasted that he likes to scrape the topping off pizza and leave the crust behind: “I like to not eat the crust so we can keep the weight down at least as good as possible.”

“Number 50!” A woman who I took to be a McDonald’s senior manager handed me my bag wearing the surprised smile of someone who had never processed an order quite like it. Now, I’m not going to fall into the trap of being all liberal media elite about McDonald’s. Some of my best friends eat McDonald’s! But I will offer these observations. The reindeer on the McDonald’s Christmas cup looks a bit like the poo emoji. The Filet-o-Fish is underrated.

The Big Mac marks out Trump as a man of the 1980s. McDonald’s burger sauce takes on a strange taste when you’re three sandwiches deep (apricot? acetone?), keeping the tongue anaesthetised as the jaw works automatically through the gristle and foam. I am lactose intolerant (don’t tell the alt-right!) but experienced no specific ill effects from the milkshake, which suggests there’s some truth to the playground rumour that it’s actually made of plaster of Paris. But by that point, I was retching and burping and feeling ANGRY. Also, the Diet Coke made my lips itch and my nose froth, which might explain why Trump does that creepy sniff thing the whole time.

I spent the afternoon sipping Diet Coke, occasionally throwing up black bile into a paper cup, watching some Hong Kong market reports on CNN. The US President might have time for eight hours of this stuff. Me, I had to finish this article, visit my mother-in-law in hospital and sew a nativity costume for my son. He’s a snowflake, would you believe.

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous,” — Arendt again. I’m not sure eating Trump’s diet taught me anything I couldn’t have guessed: it makes you feel horrendous. But thinking about Trump’s diet, well, you are what you eat, in his case, all-American garbage and parodically bad health advice. But mostly I was struck how adaptable humans are. I bottomed out at five cans of Diet Coke. But the sixth one slipped down quite nicely. I dare say I could work up to 12 a day, just as human bodies adapt to the cruellest rations, the wildest gluttony and the weirdest drugs.

So it goes with our media diets: it’s amazing the level of toxic anti-thought you can get used to. If we all stopped granting it legitimacy, what would happen then?

Donald Trump - In pictures

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