the donald trump diet

Trump’s Fast-food Diet Gets Even More Unsettling

Making fries great again. Photo: @realdonaldtrump/Instagram

Donald Trump’s bad eating habits have been chronicled in alarming depth already, but the Washington Post got an advance copy of Let Trump Be Trump, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie’s new book recounting their time on the campaign, and the paper says it paints a picture of a presidential appetite that “seems to know no bounds” at McDonald’s. A typical dinner from there, according to Lewandowski and Bossie: “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.”

That is a meal with two 540-calorie burgers, two 410-calorie fish sandwiches, and a 772-calorie shake (if he gets a medium size), for a grand total of 2,672 calories, 117 grams of fat, 3,556 milligrams of sodium, and 326 milligrams of cholesterol. The recommended daily calorie intake for a not-terribly-active man of Trump’s age is 2,000 to 2,200, and the American Heart Association warns not to exceed 2,400 milligrams of sodium per day unless you like high blood pressure.

Trump’s diet can basically be distilled into four major food groups, the book adds: “McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke.” There’s a miscellaneous junk-food group, too — in case the president got hungry en route, here’s what nonperishable food was supposedly onboard campaign flights, per the Post’s read:

The plane’s cupboards were stacked with Vienna Fingers, potato chips, pretzels and many packages of Oreos because Trump, a renowned germaphobe, would not eat from a previously opened package.

Worse still is how central this diet is to letting Trump “be Trump,” to quote the book’s title. Adviser Sam Nunberg got purposely left behind at one McDonald’s because his “special-order burger” was taking too long for the president. “Leave him,” Trump supposedly ordered. “Let’s go.” Lewandowski and Bossie add that orchestrating Trump’s meals was literally “as important as any other aspect of his march to the presidency.” Ensuring that a bag of hot fast food was waiting for Trump on the plane was therefore an all-hands-on-deck situation.

Regardless of Trump’s politics, every new detail the public learns about his diet is more cause for concern. Not only does he get a day-and-a-quarter’s worth of calories in one McDonald’s meal, but he’s 71 years old, is moody and chronically sleep-deprived, and also believes the human body is “like a battery” that comes with “a finite amount of energy,” which exercise “depletes.” Processed food doesn’t do him favors on any of these fronts.

Trump’s Fast-food Diet Gets Even More Unsettling