After a campaign rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa today, Donald Trump stopped by a local Dairy Queen. Here is what happened:
I am reminded of the time in February 1992 when President George H.W. Bush visited a Florida supermarket and was amazed at the store’s barcode scanning device. Here is a taste of Jonathan Yardley’s February 13, 1992 piece at The Washington Post:
The cultural critic Christopher Lasch used the Bush bar-code scanner story to help set up the argument of his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy: “George Bush’s wonderment, when he saw for the first time an electronic scanning device at a supermarket check-out counter, revealed, as in a flash of lightning, the chasm that divides the privileged classes from the rest of the nation. There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.”
Lasch portrayed Bush (albeit briefly) as an out-of-touch, blue-blood, old money aristocrat separated from the people by his membership in one of the nation’s elite families. His book offers economic populism as a solution to the Bush–supermarket problem.
I wonder what Lasch would think if he was alive to see Trump whisperer Steve Bannon’s love for The Revolt of the Elites.
All of this makes me wonder what happens when a populist like Trump, a man who champions the values of working-class people in the Iowa heartland, does not know what a Blizzard is? Dairy Queen first starting selling the Blizzard nearly forty years ago (1985). I would have loved to see Trump’s response when the Dairy Queen Blizzard-maker served it to him holding the cup upside down.
What does this all say about Trump’s populism and the people who put their trust in someone who has never heard of a Blizzard? I don’t know. But the Mets are playing the Padres later tonight and I don’t have much time to pick-up a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup Blizzard at the Mechanicsburg Dairy Queen before the first pitch at 9:40pm. 🙂
Addendum (July 8, 2023, 1:10am): Lasch may have had it wrong in The Revolt of the Elites. Accoridng to Snopes, Bush may not have been as out of touch as I thought. Thanks to Matt Sitman and Tim Stranske for bringing this to my attention.