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A sampling of President Donald J. Trump's daily diet
President Donald J. Trump was elected as the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America, and currently inhabits the White House most of the year while also spending time at his private properties such as Mar-a-Lago aka the ‘Winter White House.’ Whether he is in Washington D.C., overseas, or at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump maintains a very similar diet day after day.
In an ongoing series here of ‘Could you eat like a President for a day?’ we are tackling President Donald Trump’s diet which includes some peculiar decisions, such as often skipping meals to load up elsewhere in the day. Unlike U.S. Presidents from 200+ years ago, replicating President Trump‘s diet is relatively easy because it doesn’t require antiquated cooking techniques or reimagining recipes that have been mostly lost to time.
Could You Last 24 Hours Eating President Trump’s Diet?
For this clip, Bennett Rea of Cookin’ With Congress spent the day eating exactly as President Donald J. Trump does each day. It starts off rather easy, depending on your outlook, but gets progressively difficult to keep up.
First things first: President Donald J. Trump’s breakfast, or lack thereof. Whenever he is able to, President Trump skips breakfast. He rises each morning around 5:45 AM and instead of reaching for coffee or tea as his source of caffeine, President Trump downs a Diet Coke.
Trump is so fond of Diet Coke aka ‘Fridge Cigs’ that he had a Diet Coke button installed in the White House so that President Trump can have one whenever he pleases, and drinks up to 12 cans per day. This follows a trend of President Trump gravitating toward foods produced by massive corporations, as you’ll soon see why.
For snacks before lunch, President Trump is a slight germaphobe. So he prefers a fresh bag every time, typically Doritos or Lay’s potato chips, and again, always fresh and never sealed. The Diet Cokes keep flowing freely.
Time for lunch!
For lunch, President Trump slices into a steak cooked ‘well done’ until the meat begins to curl up off the plate. His steak is topped with ketchup and served with a side salad w/ Roquefort dressing which is a rich blue cheese dressing made with French Roquefort sheep’s milk cheese, mayo, buttermilk, garlic, and Worcestershire Sauce.
All things considered, President Trump is not packing on the calories through lunchtime like most U.S. Presidents, or people in general. His non-existent breakfast (0 calories) and handful of Diet Cokes before lunch (0 calories) puts him at zero calories before his snacks.
Depending on the bag size, a large bag of Doritos can run 2,200-2,400 calories while a medium-sized bag can be 1,350 to 1,400 calories. Let’s assume it is the Medium bag and put him at 1,400 calories before lunch.
The estimated macros of a 6oz well-done sirloin steak is 300 calories (50g protein), 35 cals for the ketchup, and 235 calories for the Roquefort dressing on his salad. That comes out to around 570 calories on top of the 1,400 which puts him at 1,970 calories after lunchtime.
Off to dinner!
Dinnertime is when President Donald J. Trump eats his largest meal of the day. He famously indulges in McDonald’s regularly for dinner.
Why would a billionaire eat McDonald’s regularly you might wonder? Going back to the mention of being a germaphobe, and trusting large corporations, President Trump believes that companies as large as McDonald’s are reliable because they have the most to lose through bad press via food taint and thus their food is more trustworthy than that of a family-owned diner. To him, liability is why McDonald’s is King. And he might be onto something with that logic, though this past Summer’s countless food recalls certainly impacted large chains.
For dinner, President Donald Trump’s diet calls for 2 Big Macs, 2 Filet-o-Fishes, 1 small chocolate milkshake, and another Diet Coke for good measure. Big Macs range from 540–580 calories each while the Filet-o-Fish is 380-390 calories, and the small chocolate milkshake runs 520-530 calories. All in, that is somewhere between 2,360 to 2,440 calories for dinner.
Combined with President Trump’s lunch calories (1,970), that puts his daily caloric intake somewhere between 4,330 and 4,410 calories if he is sticking to his normal daily diet and not hosting. One thing of note, as mentioned here in videos from years past, is President Trump does not drink alcohol. So he’s at least not taking in empty calories from booze like many presidents of the past:
Compared to President Taft, that is nothing. Taft would eat between 3,500–4,650 calories for breakfast alone! His daily caloric intake would reach over 10,000 calories. But President Taft was also notoriously America’s largest/heaviest President so that might not be the best point of comparison.
President Donald Trump is quite a bit taller than myself at 6’3″, but as a point of comparison my daily caloric burn is currently 2,657 calories according to MacroFactor and I’m currently training for an Ironman 70.3 and doing double workouts every day. That’s not to say that President Trump isn’t burning more than 4,000 calories every day to keep up with his diet, he is an insanely busy man as the leader of the Free World, I am simply saying I would struggle to keep up with his diet for a week if I tried.
What about you, could you tackle President Donald Trump’s diet for a day? Let me know down in the comments!