Rendering vegetables unrecognizable and hiding them in other, non-vegetable foods has long been an effective way to secretly incorporate more nutrient-rich food into a toddler’s diet. The same trick apparently — and unsurprisingly — works with Donald Trump.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, the president’s former physician Ronny Jackson — who is now running for Congress — lamented that he wasn’t able to help Trump fully overhaul his lifestyle before resigning from his duties in April 2018. “The exercise stuff never took off as much as I wanted it to,” Jackson told the Times, which could have something to do with the president’s conviction that all people are born with a finite amount of energy.
Jackson says he did, however, help improve Trump’s overall health in other ways: “We were working on his diet,” he told the Times. “We were making the ice cream less accessible, we were putting cauliflower into the mashed potatoes.”
It makes complete sense that Trump would fall for a trusted trick that parents typically use on young children, seeing as Trump, like many young children, prefers his diet to be largely made up of various shades of brown. Jackson would probably be pleased to learn that others tasked with feeding Trump appear to have imitated his strategy: Last October, Air Force One attempted to trick the President into eating not one, but multiple, vegetables, by styling a stuffed orange bell pepper to look like a jack-o’-lantern.