Amidst all the mockery over President Donald Trump serving fast food to the Clemson Tigers football team in the White House, there was one surprising contrary note. It came from Megan Garber of The Atlantic on Tuesday which was unusual because she didn't seem to be a fan of Trump judging from her past writings.
While most other mainstream media sources were laughing at Trump, Garber had a much different opinion in her article, "The President’s Big-Mac Feast Was Politically Savvy":
Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Domino’s, many of them piled, in their branded packagings, atop silver platters—that were the point: the gleaming tongs next to the wilting boxes of Filets-O-Fish.
...A dinner of champions, with only one winner: The event was thus very little about the Clemson Tigers, whose fate, on Monday evening, was to dine on lukewarm Whoppers, and very much about the man who hosted them. The leader, that leader wants you to know, MacGyvered some McDonald’s, and in that fact is an argument not just about the powers of the one politician, but also about the limits of the others.
...The broader implications of the meal, though, are philosophical. Lurking at the edges of the shutdown—wrapped, along with Wendy, around those rows of wilted burgers—are deeper questions about what government ultimately is for, and about what government can truly accomplish on behalf of a vast and hectic nation.
Contrast that strange new respect for Trump with the mocking attitudes compiled by the January 15 Washington Post: "President roasted for serving Clemson fast food":
“Of all the crazy things Trump said and did over the weekend, this might be the craziest,” Jimmy Kimmel said on his ABC show Monday night, playing a clip of the president telling reporters how he planned to feed the Clemson Tigers.
...Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers mocked the president for hosting a meal that appeared to cater less to the tastes of his guests and more to his own well-documented preferences.
“Mr. President,” Colbert said, his face contorting into an uncomfortable grimace, “is it possible you’re just projecting your favorite foods onto them?”
Despite the mockery presented in the Washington Post, they did show that not all agree with the snobbery of looking down upon fast food:
If I were a college student I'd think it was pretty sweet to eat McDonald's in the White House.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 14, 2019
Winner, Winner, (fried) Chicken Dinner!
