New York Times columnist Frank Bruni dedicated an entire column to his dislike of the ubiquitous pumpkin spice food flavoring and how it reminds him of President Trump.
In an op-ed published Tuesday night, Bruni — a former restaurant critic who now writes on politics for the New York Times — said he finds the pumpkin spice flavoring mostly synthetic and offensive. Its proliferation into so many different foods is like Trump’s domination of the national conversation, he said.
“I mean that pumpkin spice became special by shamelessly insisting that it was and ruthlessly creeping into every corner of the culture that was docile, dippy or lazy enough to accommodate it,” he wrote. “I mean that it began as a novelty: Ooh, pumpkin spice, what’s that? Our curiosity became our attention, our attention became our submission, and suddenly pumpkin spice owned us. It was barring refugees, hectoring impressionable Boy Scouts, undermining Obamacare and telling us it had a higher I.Q. than Rex Tillerson. For fun it golfed, even with Rand Paul.”
Bruni is not the first to tie pumpkin spice, most widely associated with the fall-time Starbucks “Pumpkin Spice Latte,” to Trump.
In September, a feminist group began a campaign against Starbucks locations inside Trump-branded or owned buildings, claiming that “Pumpkin Spice is Back … [and] proceeds are funding white supremacy in the White House.”
“It’s invention run amok, marketing gone mad, the odoriferous emblem of commercialism without compunction or bounds,” Bruni wrote in his column. “It’s the transformation of an illusion — there isn’t any spice called pumpkin, nor any pumpkin this spicy — into a reality. Oh, hell, let’s just go there: It’s Donald Trump.”
