With President Donald Trump back in the White House, don’t be fooled by his penchant for fast food. During his first term, while he rarely ate out, when he did he dined at high ticket steak houses like BLT Prime in his Washington hotel, or the 21 Club in New York City. His relationship with the dinner table is both transactional and political —a place for doing deals, whether with foreign powers or domestic donors. He understands what Anthony Bourdain once observed: “Nothing is more political than food”
Alex Prud’homme, a chronicler of presidential dinners, noted that “Trump understood the politics of the dinner table more than any president since the Kennedys wowed the Nobel laureates with haute cuisine and Lyndon Johnson seduced diplomats with Texas barbecue.”
Whether he uses this power as he enters his second term as president is yet to be seen. It does, however, present an opportunity for soft power that Trump’s policy team may have overlooked. Mar-a-Lago may indeed become a new venue of culinary foreign policy as Trump uses his Florida club to wine and dine both friend and foe.
Much has been written in recent years about the power of culinary diplomacy. The White House has been the scene of state dinners and receptions that carry messages to the honoree with every bite or sip taken. Dinners are used to celebrate complex diplomatic feats like the 1979 state dinner that Jimmy Carter hosted for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, marking the peace deal between their two countries. Ronald Reagan holds the record for hosting 59 state dinners. He used these occasions to showcase the power of American cuisine. When Japan’s late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to Washington, D.C., in 2015 during Barack Obama’s presidency, a state dinner focused on the two leaders showing a commitment to a long-standing alliance. They did so with food and with music from the cast of the Jersey Boys.
Even a burger-eating President Trump reluctantly hosted two state dinners. A personal dinner French President Emmanuel Macron was thought to be the start of “le bromance,” but after Trump called NATO “obsolete,” Macron quickly soured on the overture even when he was invited for a formal state dinner. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, an anti-immigrant conservative, was the guest at Trump’s second state dinner, where relations were more congenial, and which served as a prelude to trade talks about China and the Pacific Rim.
Donald Trump stands behind a table covered in fast-food hamburger boxes while a staff member lights an ornate candelabra.
U.S President Donald Trump watches as candles are lit as he presents fast food to be served to the Clemson Tigers football team to celebrate their national championship at the White House in Washington on Jan. 14, 2019. Chris Kleponis/Getty Images
Using meals to build trust and persuade is an essential part of statecraft that our diplomats use in the field. A recent memoir by Tom Loftus, the U.S. ambassador to Norway during the Clinton administration, features a chapter discussing how important dinners and wine promotion was to his diplomatic work.
Even during some of the toughest political negotiations, food can play an outsized role. In a story about the Iran nuclear talks, journalist Robin Wright wrote about a meal offered by the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to Secretary of State John Kerry and his staff on July 4, 2015, that provided an informal setting for U.S. and Iranian negotiators to break bread together for the first time. The negotiations had been deadlocked, but 10 days later, the parties were able to reach an agreement after long months of negotiations. Could it have been the Persian food at lunch, the commensality of the moment? We will never know for sure, but psychologists confirm that sharing a meal is a basic tool for building trust.
The Culinary Diplomatic Corps Initiative launched in 2012 when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state; it was led by chef and humanitarian Chef Jose Andres, and featured over 50 notable U.S. chefs who went to work demonstrating the diversity of U.S. agricultural bounty, the talent of American cooks, and the importance of food as a tool of statecraft. Clinton rightly noted that “food isn’t traditionally thought of as a diplomatic tool, but…sharing a meal can help people transcend boundaries and build bridges in a way that nothing else can.”
From from The Hungry Hegemon
When Trump was elected president in 2016, the Chef Corps (as it was also known) was disbanded. It may have been a decision that his short-lived Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made, but it ended one of the most successful acts of U.S. diplomacy. Chef Marc Murphy, who traveled to the U.S. Embassy in Turkey for the Chef Corps, noted that “the one thing that everybody has in common in this world is we all have to eat, and I feel as though diplomats, if they all [engaged ] on a full stomach, we would all be better off.” Trump and his advisors saw no need to continue what was considered wasteful. Moreover, it was a program housed at the State Department—which meant that Trump, who wanted to position himself as the central power broker, did not receive the limelight.
In 2023, President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, reinaugurated the program, established a new partnership with the James Beard Foundation, and set up a reconfigured Chef Corps that was even larger and more diverse than the original one established in 2012. Once again, high-profile chefs were called in to help curate meals for state dinners and luncheons. They traveled, often at their own expense, to other countries, to illustrate the range of the U.S. table.
It’s a program currently being challenged in D.C. Yet unlike in the first Trump administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio might insist that the Culinary Diplomatic Partnership is something worth keeping. Moving this program out of Washington, D. C., could also showcase other parts of the country, bringing culinary diplomacy to communities.
He can use his Florida Latino culinary heritage to persuade Trump to officially make Mar-a-Lago the center of culinary diplomacy. After all, it has already become Trump’s de facto power center. By focusing the attention on Trump, it would put the president at the center of this form of statecraft. Rubio could help him by featuring more local chefs, moving beyond the Beltway, and showing how you can promote the soft power of the kitchen.
Who can forget the infamous 2019 fast-food dinner when Trump served the Clemson University football team heaps of fast food on silver platters? Yet what may have seemed like a protocol faux pas could turn out to be a sign of Trump’s understanding of the raw power that food has, whether it’s of the fast variety or prepared by a Michelin chef.
Donald Trump smiles and leans forward as he shakes hands with Xi Jinping who also smiles. They sit next to each other at a dinner table.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands during dinner at Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6, 2017. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Four people sit at a round table covered in a table cloth and set for dinner. They are outside with lush greenery around them.
Trump and First Lady Melania Trump sit with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and wife Akie Abe at a Mar-a-Lago dinner on April 17, 2018. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
While he was out of office, Trump’s critics overlooked the role that Mar-a-Lago played as a venue for culinary diplomacy as foreign policy. In July 2024, he entertained Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban; in early January, he hosted Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni before she met with Biden in Washington. The meals he has shared with dignitaries and heads of state from around the world typify the sort of personally focused deals that Trump loves. The table is a perfect venue for him to “make culinary diplomacy great again.”
What goes on the table in a Trump White House may not look like the food that was served during the Obama or Biden years. But whether Trump prefers his mother’s ketchup-laden meatloaf or a well-done steak, what matters is that he does not neglect the dining table as a space for building trust. And along the way he can make our nation strong, our citizens healthy, and our farmland productive. Who says dining isn’t political?