There are easier examples anyway eg Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray come to mind.
On a slightly different subtopic – and dammit, I lost the original article link I had – but a few days ago Trump held a major fundraising event at his Trump National golf club in Virginia in support of his cryptocurrency scam. Attendees paid around $300,000 apiece to have dinner and listen to him bloviate and pitch his scam in perhaps one of the most egregious examples of corrupt exploitation of political power ever seen. To add to the scumminess of the whole thing, the White House claimed it was a “strictly personal” event he was doing, despite him flying in on Marine One and then making his pitch from the presidential lectern with the presidential seal.
But what I always wonder about these sorts of exotic dinners is, what was the food like? What do you get for $300,000?
Well, this is Trump, master of cheapness and bad taste. Here’s what they got. It was supposed to be filet mignon and pan-fried halibut. I presume the pale thing on the right is a piece of dead halibut, not really fried much. What the black thing on the left is I have no idea, but I presume that’s Trump’s idea of a filet mignon. I know he likes his steaks well done and then re-hydrates them with ketchup, but this thing looks beyond salvation. The veggies look equally sad.
If you think this looks horrible, reports from attendees confirm that it tasted just as bad as it looks.
Can we crowdfund Gordon Ramsay to go to one of these things? I’d love to see him screaming at Trump.
Nothing says ‘classy, gourmet food’ like mashed potatoes from a #4 disher does!
Pretty sure that you could play hockey with that thing.
I’ve enjoyed more than a few filets mignon in my life, and that thing bears no resemblance to any of them.
L
Not so much filet mignon as filet moche.
I wonder who on his staff talked him out of serving what he really wanted to serve, namely, Big Macs?
When I was still married, I took my wife on dates to some impressive fine-dining restaurants here in Cape Town. Expensive, but you get value for the money.
Mr. Trump’s chef apparently can’t even flip burgers. And crucially, Trump doesn’t even want a skill level above that.
But he wants the grift.
First thanks for that article. While it did what was needed (defend Harvard) it still was a full throated defence of the line of reasoning that “Yes, the Left has gone too far. But Harvard is still good” Which is the most bullshit type of defence his alt-right loving, race science defending, gene-centric obsessed “heterodox” self can come up with. It falls along the same lines that he’s been pushing for decades; that the left is banning science (race science), discussion (more race science), and reason from the public sphere.
I will congratulate Pinker for doing the BARE MINIMUM by defending Harvard. He doesn’t get anymore credit then that. He drummed “the left is taking over and destroying reason in academia” fear mongering for more than a decade. In fact, Pinker and a collection of 39 of these anti-left anti-woke scaremongers have a book coming out in July banging that very same drum (YES, EVEN TO THIS DAY THEY MILK THAT COW) “The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process”.
Pinker has ties to the internet Alt-right going back decades, and popularized and wrote in alt-right rags like Quillette to defend ideas that are basically race science. I’ll link to posts I made 4 and 16 years ago about his ties to Steve Sailer (an internet White Nationalist leader of dumbass racialists). But in truth his support goes much deeper than contributing to a racialist think tank, and voicing support for academic racists on twitter. Pinker was apart of an army of Internet wannabe “rationalist thinkers” who led us into the world of Alt-right racialist wing-nuttery for decades.
He did it through idiotic straw man books like “the blank slate” and outright lying about the state of higher education with fear mongering. These actions lead to the very same open conspiracy theories that Trump uses to CRUSH DISSENTING VOICES, FREE ACADEMIC RESEARCH, AND PARTICIPATION OF RACIALIZED MINORITIES and VULNERABLE FOREIGN STUDENTS.
It is a direct line from “the woke left is crushing free thought and muffling universities” to what Trump is doing.
Maybe its because I’ve grown older, or maybe its the CLEAR AND APPARENT RISE IN FACISM… But I have less and less tolerance for these alt-right, anti-woke, anti-left, old grievance driving, scaremongering, chicken littles.
As it turns out…the problem wasn’t the progressives at all, but the regressive and fascist right. Who’d thunk it? Well at least these bozos got to milk that anti-woke cash cow. They can all go to hell.
My first thought was “did they use an ice cream scoop for the mashed potatoes”? I think I made more appetizing plates in my college freshman dorm room that had no kitchen.
I can across this left-leaning (the Genetically Modified Skeptic) review of the book a few weeks ago–The “Skeptics” Are Crashing Out HARD:
They just want to save science! But not from the people actually defunding it.
Based on the title of the book, I was curious about it. After watching this takedown, I doubt I’d read a free version.
Subscribed. What an excellent review of this current state of the public intellectual, anti-woke, cash-cow-grift-to-open-insanity reality show.
It’s always comforting to see a glimmer of sanity in the tidal wave of rage baiting, anti-wokism that seemingly all the aging reactionary “public intellectuals” have decided to incestuously self bathe, circle and promote.
Glimmers of hope, all from the educated youth and progressives. Sigh, it does feel like they have a mountain of aging and raging politically-blind boomers hating against them (and even our shared institutions suffer due to these regressives).
A leftover Trump Steak that he’s been keeping in storage for just such an occasion
The brown thing looks to me like fried calf liver, though it may have traces of fiber and may therefore be muscle of some sort.
I’m not defending trump’s catering choices for his event.
But I think this does demonstrate at least a little bit the difficulty of food photography that shows a plating off to good advantage.
While this is sometimes true, that isn’t the problem here, or at most might be a minor contributing factor to how awful it looks. Consider that the plating completely lacks even a modicum of effort at an elegant presentation. Instead you have an unappetizing arrangement that would be an embarrassment in a high school cafeteria. The mashed potatoes appear to have been dumped on the plate with an ice cream scoop, partly covering the veggies, instead of maybe something like piped and oven-browned Potatoes Duchess. Then a couple of sauces carelessly spooned or squirted on the plate, and the steak and halibut thrown on top to wallow in them. There was no attempt to artfully swirl the sauces on and around the items. The “pan-fried halibut” doesn’t look properly seared. There are no additional ingredients like maybe some lemon and lime or capers for the fish, maybe truffle or at least mushrooms for the steak. And though the colours may be off, that steak definitely is close to black compared to the sauce and the other ingredients.
Additionally, there was commentary from some of the guests that in real life it looked as bad as the pic (for the above reasons) and tasted just as bad.
Trump’s astonishing bad taste is legendary in his mannerisms, in the way he treats and insults others, in his taste in decor, and here we see what he considers “elegance” worthy of a $300,000-a-plate dinner (though perhaps some of that was “invested” in his scam cryptocurrency, but I’m sure most of it was grift going into his own pocket).
Hence, no doubt, the crypto-meal.
If people are paying $300,000 for a meal with the President, they’re not there for the meal. True, you could provide them with a nice meal and still rake in an immense amount of cash, but equally, if you can afford $300,000 for an evening out, you can afford to get a pizza on the way home. They must know who he is, so they know that he’s not going to be a good host.
They’re also not there for a culinary insult.
They’re there to curry favor, and ideally get choice seats, for the impending slaughter of a bunch of rubes. The 300K is the admission ticket. The meal is a known fig leaf.
Whenever you’re currying favor with trump, you know you’re gonna have a shitty taste in your mouth before it’s over. That’s just part of the territory. In exchange for a chance to make enough money as one of the people in on the early rungs of what’s effectively a pyramid scam, folks will willing eat a lot of shit with their silver spoons.