This scene shows U.S. President Donald Trump serving Clemson football players a variety of fast foods during the team's White House visit.
As if that's unusual in any way.
Actually, there is a long history of Presidents and fast food - as long as the existence of fast foods itself. Senator Lyndon Johnson had a hamburger for lunch every day. Bush 43 ate cheeseburger pizzas.
But there are two Presidents who had a special relation to fast food.
You've probably already thought of Bill Clinton, whose own love of burgers was so well-known that Saturday Night Live incorporated it into a sketch.
But President Clinton's love of fast food would have Constitutional implications, when - during a government shutdown - the President asked one of his interns to get him some pizza.
After a few minutes, in Ms. Lewinsky's recollection, she told [the President] that she needed to get back to her desk. The President suggested that she bring him some slices of pizza. A few minutes later, she returned to the Oval Office area with pizza. Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President had a sexual encounter during this visit. They kissed, and the President touched Ms. Lewinsky's bare breasts with his hands and mouth. At some point, Betty Currie (Clinton's secretary) approached the door leading to the hallway, which was ajar, and said that the President had a telephone call. Ms. Lewinsky recalled that the caller was a Member of Congress with a nickname.While the President was on the telephone, according to Ms. Lewinsky, "he unzipped his pants and exposed himself," and she performed oral sex. Again, he stopped her before he ejaculated.
But Clinton's pizza-fueled encounter with Monica Lewinsky was not the only Presidential fast-food...um, flirtation with Constitutional implications. For this we have to go back into the past - so far back, as a matter of fact, that the McDonald brothers still owned McDonald's, and Ray Kroc was merely working for them. Yep, we're going back to another President that golfed a lot:
It was a crisp Saturday afternoon in September 1955. The U.S. economy was booming, there were no major crises in the world and the president of the United States, enjoying an approval rating of 79 percent, was on vacation. Then, on the eighth hole of the Cherry Hills Country Club golf course, just outside Denver, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 64, started complaining of indigestion, which he attributed to the hamburger with Bermuda onions he had wolfed down between his morning and afternoon games.
Those pesky burgers. But the focus on indigestion was a near-fatal mistake.
That night, after experiencing indigestion, Eisenhower awoke to chest pains around 2 a.m. His personal physician, Maj. Gen. Howard Snyder, was called to the scene and administered an injection of morphine. Amazingly, it would be almost 12 hours before the president was taken to the hospital. At 8 o’clock the following morning, the White House announced that Eisenhower had suffered “digestive upset” in the night; four hours later, it was again claimed that the president’s “indigestion” was not serious.
But as Eisenhower’s chest pains persisted into the afternoon, an electrocardiograph was brought in and recorded an acute myocardial infarction, and at around 2 p.m. the president was finally rushed to the hospital. From his research into the delay, Lasby concludes that “Snyder mistook a coronary thrombosis for a gastrointestinal problem, waited for 10 hours before he recognized his mistake and called for help, and conducted an unremitting cover-up of his error for the rest of his life.”
But all worked out well in the end. Vice President Nixon (in those days before the 25th Amendment) helped to keep things running until Ike came back, and as he prepared to run for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon released a book called Six Crises. If it hadn't been for the heart attack, I guess it would have been Five Crises.
Despite the botched diagnosis, President Eisenhower never turned to Major General Snyder and said, "You're fired." Snyder continued to serve as Eisenhower's physician until 1961. And he presumably didn't assume that hamburgers were always evil.
