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Tr*mp’s love of fast food is a disgustingly well-documented phenomenon. In the past, it was a detail that endeared him to the working class voters he needed to win over in his first term. Now, it’s another liability, like everything else about the 80-year-old’s presidential legacy.
By now we’ve all heard about the Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce scandal that has over 7,000 Americans in 30 states running to the nearest toilet with painful regularity. The cyclospora outbreak is entirely the Tr*mp administration’s fault in several obvious ways, starting with RFK Jr.’s deliberate cutting of the CDC’s parasite monitoring program that could have nipped the bacterial spread in the bud at a manageable stage. But now, after a questionably-timed White House visit with Taylor Farms, a new story is emerging, not about the outbreak, but about the cover-up.
Journalists were quick to note that before the mid-July visit, the FDA announced that Taylor Farms products were, in fact, the source of the cyclospora outbreak. Specifically, the shredded lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by a certain outpost in Mexico. After the visit, the FDA took it all back, saying that recent testing revealing a “false positive.”
It didn’t take long for people to start calling BS.
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Taylor Farms even put out a statement yesterday saying that the FDA apologized for “making a mistake” in pointing the finger at them in the first place. But there’s a problem…
The “false positive” test the FDA referred to in their new statement was a completely different test to the previous one that identified the cyclospora in the Taco Bell shredded lettuce. Taylor Farms has also recalled several products before this point. Today’s New York Times newsletter also mentions that the bacteria has so far only been traced to Taylor Farms products.
The plot heated up after we learned that the owner of Taylor Farms made a significant donation to a MAGA super-PAC last year.
Which brings us to the second half of the developing food-borne scandal in the White House: Olive Garden’s never-ending pasta deal.
While people in the midwest are crapping themselves silly, Tr*mp’s enablers have hit on another way to revive the zombified corpse of the racist SAVE act, despite Tr*mp having nowhere near the votes to push it through.
Called a “throwback to Jim Crow-era voter suppression” by the National Urban League, Tr*mp’s pet act claims to be about voter security. In reality, the measure at its most stringent would require proof of citizenship to be present at the time of voting, in the form of a passport or birth certificate along with photo ID. But since millions of Americans, primarily Black Americans, lack access to these documents the voter protection claim looks a lot more like voter suppression.
In the comparatively low stakes world of fast food, it’s a different story. Since Olive Garden’s never-ending pasta promotion now requires an photo ID and pasta pass to take advantage of the deal, Tr*mp thinks that his dead-in-the-water act has another chance.
Some simps Republicans agree: Wisconsin rep. Bryan Steil said on the congress floor this week: “We are protecting our breadsticks more than our ballots.” According to the New York Times, that mention somehow wasn’t the only one. “Olive Garden and its endless pasta deal were invoked seven times in what is a normally dry House committee hearing and once on the Senate floor,” the paper reported.
We’ve seen Tr*mp’s policies take inspiration from fast food before: earlier this year, United States Arctic Research Commission Tom Dans told the New Yorker that the reason for his buddy Tr*mp’s obsession with Greenland was simple. He wanted to bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.
In a sane universe, someone close to the president would have the nerve to say that just because something works at a fast casual dining chain doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to implement on the federal level. As we know, we are not living in that world. With all the other things the Tr*mp administration has taken away from us, we can only hope that for some midterm voters, the loss of the ability to safely order Taco Bell proves the final straw.
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The cover up continues…
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