Look, sometimes a man just needs a malted milkshake. Admittedly, there are less opportune moments to indulge in such a craving — say, when you're in a highly classified briefing about Afghanistan with your country's senior defense and intelligence officials.
Nevertheless, President Trump reportedly brought such a huddle to a halt a few months after he took office in 2017, Politico reports. "Does anyone want a malt?" the commander-in-chief supposedly asked the top-ranking officials who'd assembled for the briefing at his New Jersey golf club, including the head of the CIA's Special Activities Center, "a little known unit" that is "responsible for operations that include clandestine or covert operations with which the U.S. government does not want to be overtly associated," Spec Ops Magazine explains.
Trump urged, "We have the best malts, you have to try them," before inviting a waiter into the code-word-secure briefing room to satisfy his sweet tooth. "The malt episode ... became legendary inside the CIA, said three former officials," Politico writes, explaining that "it was seen as an early harbinger of Trump's disinterest in intelligence, which would later be borne out by the new president's notorious resistance to reading his classified daily briefing." (That is to say, pictures were added to the briefings to help keep him engaged).
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Still, this is a man who has flexed the power of the nation's highest office to … install a button on his desk in the Oval Office that summons a butler to bring him a Diet Coke. The briefings can wait! To paraphrase a queen of France who was similarly burdened with the trivialities of running a country when there were sweets to consume, let them drink milkshakes.
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