It was the fast food feast heard ’round the world.
On Jan. 14, President Trump welcomed the Clemson University Tigers football team to the White House, treating the Nick Saban-slaying national champions to a meal in the State Dining Room composed entirely of selections from national fast-food chains. The estimated 300-burger, $3,000 spread of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Domino’s was chosen, and paid for, by the president himself.
A now-iconic image captured the scene. President Trump grins wolfishly, arms outstretched, presenting his bounty of Big Macs, McNuggets, double cheeseburgers, and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, while a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looks on solemnly from the back of the regal hall.
Burgers by candlelight: U.S. President Donald Trump lays out fast food for college football champs https://t.co/o8iIVAbPvJ by @robertarampton pic.twitter.com/fpGihyiQkC
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) January 15, 2019
The banquet set the Internet ablaze and the chattering classes atwitter. Late-night hosts mocked, scolds tittered, and social media memed. Some praised Trump’s common-man sensibilities; others found it the latest example of his boorishness. The rest simply reveled in the hyper-American absurdity.
For me, it brought to mind another near-farcical White House reception: Old Hickory’s big cheese party.
In 1837, President Andrew Jackson threw open the doors of the people’s house and invited the public to join him in disposing of a two-foot-thick, 1,400-pound wheel of cheese that had been given to him. Some 10,000 people streamed into the reception and devoured the open-air-aged block of New York cheddar in under two hours.
As newspaper correspondent Benjamin Perley Poore reminisced years later, “For hours did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of it away with them … The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day.” Even the petticoat affair scandal, which was then all the rage, was, Poore wrote, “forgotten in the tumultuous jubilation of that great occasion.”
Jackson was the prototype populist president, and Trump’s populism is most effective when it taps into the Jacksonian strand latent within our national ethos, characterized by a libertarian individualism, respect for historic American values, and, crucially, a hefty suspicion of elites. By catering the celebration with fast food, Trump seized an otherwise-unforeseen opportunity to hit these very notes and score political points.
When Trump brought in the burgers, pizza, and fries, the equestrian statue of Old Hickory, just in front of the White House in Lafayette Square, surely had a smile on his face.
— J. Grant Addison
