Attendees at former president Donald Trump’s VIP party at the Conservative Political Action Committee dined on cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes as a way to emulate the former president’s love of fast food.
The VIP party came ahead of the former president’s speech at CPAC and was a sign of how much Trump iconography has taken over the Republican Party. His son Donald Trump Jr was set to give the closing speech on Sunday.
Mr Trump notably loves fast food, telling CNN in 2016 that he prefers the consistency as well as the taste, which he calls “great stuff.”
“One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s. One bad hamburger and you take Wendy’s and all these other places and they’re out of business,” he said at the time. “I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”
The former president’s diet has raised concern from his eldest daughter Ivanka, who told Barbara Walters in 2016 that “I want him to eat healthier,” and less quickly “but it’s the only speed he knows.
In 2016, after he received enough delegates to win the Republican nomination for president, he posted a photo of himself enjoying a meal from McDonald’s alongside a Diet Coke (despite him tweeting that he had never seen a thin person drinking the beverage).
The love continued even after he won the White House. As Politico reported in 2017, Keith Schiller, Mr Trump’s former body man, made a McDonald’s run for the president for his preferred Quarter Pounder with Cheese with no pickles and extra ketchup.
The stories were so believable that in 2016, one Republican operative told The New Yorker that a friend on the Trump campaign in 2016 had sent him a Snapchat video of then-New Jersey Gov Chris Christie fetching Mr Trump’s McDonald’s order. But Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg later told Politico that he made up the story to humiliate Mr Christie.
Perhaps most notably, in 2019, Mr Trump served Clemson University’s championship-winning team fast food from Wendy’s, McDonald’s and pizza.
