The hot dog has been one of the presidency’s most delectable diplomatic tools, both foreign and domestic, for the better part of a century, and I’ll bet you had no idea.
But of course, that’s all ruined since the trans fat-laden Donald Trump has made the endearing hot dog nothing more than a moldy, measly money-maker.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Trump has been ordering hot dogs for his Secret Service detail at his Virginia golf club, only to have his own club turn around and bill the agency for them. Because ethics rules bar agents from accepting gifts from the man they protect, Trump’s staff reportedly set up a special account just so the president could hand out “free” hot dogs with one bruised hand while his business invoiced the government with the other.
As usual, Trump has managed to take something quintessentially American, in this case the humble hot dog, a fixture of presidential lore, and turn it into the perfect symbol of his second term, where everything, even the hot dog, is for sale.
It got me thinking that the hamburger is next. Perhaps Trump will set up a hamburger stand on the street side of his new ballroom and charge $50 for a patty with his image burned into it, using the proceeds to purchase gold appliqués and super glue to adorn the ballroom.
The irony of Trump’s hot dog scheme is that the tasty treat has played a very different role throughout presidential history. It has, at various points, been a diplomatic icebreaker, a regulatory crusade, a peace offering, and a punchline. What it had never been, until now, was a revenue stream.
Perhaps most famously, FDR made the hot dog a hero in 1939, serving King George VI and Queen Elizabeth cheap dogs on paper plates when the royal couple visited his Hyde Park estate. Queen Elizabeth was unsure how to eat the unfamiliar food served on silver trays. She asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt how to eat it, and FDR replied, “Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.”
It was a shrewd piece of manipulation, designed to humanize the British monarchy for a skeptical, isolationist American public just months before the world went to war. In fact, it worked so well it’s still taught as a case study in soft power, a president using 30 cents of processed meat to help nudge a nation toward its future allies.
Thirty years later, Richard Nixon, a man who was remembered for eating cottage cheese topped with ketchup, made the hot dog a personal cause. When cheap, fatty lobby meat threatened to flood the market, Nixon went to bat for the American frank, personally pushing through the 30 percent fat cap that still governs hot dog production today.
The event, once referred to as the “Fatty Hot Dog Scandal,” unfortunately is lost in history because it was supplanted by something called Watergate.
Thirty years later, kosher hot dogs were used as an icebreaker between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, during tense and high-stakes negotiations in Norway.
The “hot dog diplomacy” was orchestrated by David Hermelin, the U.S. Ambassador to Norway, who set up a picnic table in the residence that featured Hebrew National hot dogs that Barak, Arafat and Bill Clinton negotiated over. The “hot dog diplomacy” dinner succeeded in temporarily easing tensions and restoring personal warmth, but unfortunately, the meaningful breakthroughs did not last.
And in 2012, Barack Obama turned the pig-in-a-blanket into a diplomatic dilemma, taking British Prime Minister David Cameron to a college basketball game in Dayton, Ohio. Obama, who famously declared that no one over age 8 should eat a hot dog with ketchup, graciously let Cameron violate the rule in the spirit of diplomacy.
In every case, the hot dog tasted better because the president was the one giving it away.
Then Trump got his hands on the wiener. He didn’t just fail to continue the tradition. Instead, he inverted it, warping the frank’s worthiness by being, in the most literal sense, a worthless weenie. He turned a beloved American institution into a cash cow, watching his own security detail eat the hot dogs he ordered for them, then sending off a bill for his own generosity.
Leave it to Trump to take something as delightful as a hot dog and turn the glizzy into a gross, greasy representation of his grifting presidency.
What once charmed a king and queen, survived Nixon’s fat-content crusade, and helped broker peace in the Middle East now sits burnt on a moldy bun, a fitting monument to the rotten meat at the center of Trump’s presidency.
Other presidents understood that the hot dog was a tasty and tantalizing part of the job. Trump saw it as a chance to make a buck.
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