It was a story about hamburgers.
“It’s high summer — hamburger season,” said the lead of the piece, published in the Washington Post on Tuesday. “The char, the fat, the squishy perfection of processed bread sopping up the overflowing juices — doesn’t it somehow seem like Americans’ birthright? There’s a reason that President Trump chose to serve hamburgers — twice — as an all-American feast for some all-American championship college football players.”
But the headline was ominous — and pathetic.
“Even one of Trump’s favorite foods has a hidden Russia connection.”
Months after the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to tie Trump or his campaign to an effort by Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, The Post is still prattling on about it.
Here’s the paper’s thinking, apparently: Trump likes burgers; Russia likes burgers; Trump enlisted Russia to alter the election’s outcome. We don’t know for sure, but that’s all we can guess.
Here’s the second paragraph of the piece: “But peel back the oil-spattered pages of history, and you’ll find that the sandwich so closely aligned with the stars and stripes was once also embraced by the hammer and sickle. (Yep, like so much about this current administration, even Trump’s beloved hamburgers have surprising ties to Russia.) In the 1930s, when McDonald’s was just a greasy twinkle in Ray Kroc’s eye — he didn’t open his first McDonald’s until 1955 — the Soviet Union was a couple of decades out from its revolution and in the midst of industrialization and urbanization on a staggering scale. Tens of millions left the countryside for the cities, as feudal farmers transformed into urban Soviet workers. And these workers needed to be fed.”
“… even Trump’s beloved hamburgers have surprising ties to Russia”?! What does that mean?!?
The story then morphs into a history of the hamburger in Russia. The writer — Deena Prichep is a print and radio journalist based in Portland, Ore., and co-author of the cookbook “Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking” — says in 1936, Anastas Mikoyan, the head of the Ministry of Food, took a trip to the U.S., citing Irina Glushchenko, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics University
“ ‘For Mikoyan, hamburgers obviously became the most powerful shock in his entire trip,’ Glushchenko explains, citing the loving mentions of American machine-made burgers in Mikoyan’s memoirs. In the steaming burgers and buns churned out for sale in stadiums and parks, Mikoyan saw a solution to the food needs of the Soviet Union. ‘Mikoyan shared Trump’s opinion of fast food. He was a great admirer,” Gronow says, laughing. “If the war hadn’t broken out in 1941, we would have a chain of McMikoyan’s,’ ” the paper said.
That’s it. Those are the mentions of Trump in the story.
Wow. The Post used to be a great newspaper.
Not anymore.
