The One Food Donald Trump Won’t Eat — Unless It Comes Through a Drive-Thru Window
Donald Trump has eaten Big Macs on Air Force One, served buckets of KFC at the White House, and famously ordered two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches alongside two Big Macs and a chocolate shake as a single sitting meal.
The man’s relationship with food is one of the most documented, most photographed, and most divisive in American political history. But there is one food that not even a presidential trip to its home country could convince him to try, and the story of how he handled that situation is genuinely something.
The Four Food Groups of Trump Force One
Before getting to the refusal, it helps to understand the baseline. According to former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, on Trump’s campaign plane there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke.
The plane was reportedly stocked with sealed packages of potato chips and Oreos, because Trump would only eat from a fresh, unopened package of snacks.
His preferred McDonald’s order was two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate shake, a combination that exceeds 2,400 calories in a single meal. The KFC, for the record, he reportedly eats with a knife and fork.
A Man With Very Particular Rules
Trump’s food preferences are not just about what he likes. They come with a full set of conditions. His steak must be well-done and served with ketchup, with no garnish, vegetables, or sauce alongside it. His pizza he eats toppings-only, scraping the cheese and toppings off the dough with a knife and fork and leaving the crust entirely untouched, a habit he openly admitted in a 2010 interview to keep his weight in check.
His burgers, too, sometimes arrive with only half a bun for the same reason. He reportedly consumes around 12 Diet Cokes a day, with a button in the Oval Office that summons a butler with one on demand.
The Food He Flat-Out Refuses
Now for the main event. During a trip to Japan in 1990, well before any political career was on the horizon, Trump attended a formal dinner with Japanese bankers. According to the book ‘Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump’, he stood up and walked out before the meal was served, leaving his team to manage the fallout with their hosts.
His stated position on the matter was blunt and fully quotable, and boiled down to a firm refusal to eat raw fish.
The first real meal he ate in Tokyo the following day was a hamburger at a Japanese McDonald’s, which reportedly cheered him up considerably.
A Position That Has Not Changed
Decades and multiple state visits to Japan later, Trump’s stance on raw fish has remained completely consistent. During his presidential visits alongside the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the menu at their shared meals featured American-style hamburgers with Heinz ketchup and mustard, steaks, ice cream sundaes, wagyu beef, grilled chicken, and baked potatoes.
Not a piece of sushi in sight. His wife Melania shares the same position, having instructed her staff ahead of a formal 2019 state dinner in Japan that she would not be having sushi under any circumstances. The two instead dined on a six-course European menu that evening.
The Filet-O-Fish Exception
The delicious irony in all of this is that fish itself is not the problem. Trump is famously devoted to the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, a battered, deep-fried fish fillet that bears essentially no resemblance to the ocean it came from.
He reportedly feels it could use more tartar sauce, which is a food critique very few people have strong feelings about, but he does.
Cooked, processed, wrapped in a bun, served through a window by a stranger in a uniform, and ideally extra-sauced: that is the fish Donald Trump will eat.
The raw, fresh, expertly prepared version served in one of the world’s most celebrated food cultures? A firm no, documented in print since 1993, and apparently not up for renegotiation anytime soon.
There is something almost poetic about a man who will eat a bucket of fried chicken with silverware on a private jet but draws a hard line at sushi. It is perhaps the most on-brand food story in modern American politics, and at this point, it is basically part of the official record.
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