Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer  

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.  

During President Trump’s first term in office, it seemed to many avid readers and viewers of legacy news media as if he were about to be ousted from the Oval Office over one scandal after another, some more real than others. Claims that Trump was just on the verge of leaving office were so ubiquitous that in 2019, one YouTube user assembled an extensive, timestamped compilation of major news pundits claiming that “the walls were closing in” on Trump or that it was “the beginning of the end” for his presidency. The walls, needless to say, did not close in. 

Amid the media furor over President Trump, shortly after his inauguration in 2017, one story became a singularly sticky flashpoint: Trump’s preference for two scoops of ice cream at dessert. In May 2017, a duo of reporters for Time accompanied Trump during his off-camera hours. One moment in their reporting became infamous: 

The waiters know well Trump’s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else. The tastes of Pence are also tended to. Instead of the pie, he gets a fruit plate. 

Innumerable outlets summarized and repackaged and analyzed Time’s reporting. Many assessed the asymmetric ice cream portions as a petty power move by the president or took them as another sign of Trump’s oft-decried, alleged culinary immaturity. The Cut headlined an article, “Donald Trump Continues to Eat Like a Middle Schooler Whose Parents Are Working Late”; a Mashable headline read, “Donald Trump is a big boy president who gets more ice cream than everyone else.” BuzzFeed News anthologized social media posts from the time mocking Trump’s dietary habits. Health and science news outlet STAT published an article on Trump’s 71st birthday, which fell about a month after the “two scoops” reportage began, with an ominous image of a golden, Trump-monogrammed scale. Despite its memorably grim image, however, the article argues that individuals’ weight becomes less of a health concern as they enter old age.  

Perhaps the most famous moment of the media’s “two scoops” frenzy came mere days after the Time article’s publication, when Saturday Night Live aired a skit parodying the president. SNL’s fictionalized Trump, played by Alec Baldwin, argues against a comparison between himself and Richard Nixon. “I bet he only got one scoop of ice cream for dessert. I get two scoops. Two scoops.” Later in 2017, OJ Simpson mentioned that he had heard the two scoops story in prison.

It was everywhere. 

Just after Time published its article featuring the “two scoops” incident, CNN aired a segment, which it also posted on YouTube, summarizing the reporting and some of the resulting mockery of Trump from the public. The segment, reported and narrated by Jeanne Moos, quotes social media posts and shows memes critical of Trump’s ice cream habit, and compares then-future President Joe Biden’s apparently more modest affection for ice cream favorably to Trump’s excesses.  

CNN’s coverage, which extended beyond Moos’s segment, received a sardonic response from the conservative press. Mainstream conservative reactions to CNN’s coverage included scathing criticism from right-wing news outlet Breitbart, while Fox News continued to lambast CNN for its reporting on Trump’s ice cream preferences and other dietary habits well into 2018. 

“Confidence in the mass media is historically low, with fewer than three in 10 Americans now placing trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, fairly and accurately,” reports Gallup after a recent round of polling. Although the decline in trust in the media is evident across the partisan aisle, the decline has been sharpest among Republicans. According to Gallup’s data, Republicans’ trust in media fell precipitously around 2015 and has not risen since.  

The percentage of Republican respondents who said that they have “no trust at all” in the media rose rapidly from 2015 through the early years of Trump’s first term, while far fewer Republicans have reported having a “great deal/fair amount” of trust in the media since the same timeframe. Comments on CNN’s initial “two scoops” video serve as a snapshot of the decline in conservatives’ trust in mainstream media.  

Although the veracity of Time’s reporting on the fateful dessert course has never come into question, other outlets’ disproportionate response to Trump’s two scoops of vanilla seemed to many conservatives a delicious confirmation of the legacy media’s bias and waning power.