On Thursday, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank will sit down for a meal he never expected to eat, the result of a development he never expected to come.
Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and so Milbank — per a promise he made back in October — will feast on the ink he used to dismiss such a scenario.
Seven months ago, Milbank asserted that Trump would lose in his bid for the GOP nomination. In the unlikely event that he was proven wrong, Milbank vowed that he would eat his words.
“Literally,” he wrote in October. “The day Trump clinches the nomination I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post.”
Bon appetit, Dana.
Among the rubble of errant Trump forecasts, Milbank’s ill-advised pledge stands out, eliciting a combination of schadenfreude and bemusement.
The science-focused website Stat News published a story on Wednesday detailing the dangers of eating a newspaper (Conclusion: not too risky, though hardly recommended).
Milbank is having fun with it all. He solicited recipes from readers — “Trumpkin pie with newspaper and yams” among them — and the winning submissions will be prepared by Victor Albisu, the head chef at Washington, D.C.’s Del Campo restaurant.
On Thursday, with the Post’s award-winning food critic Tom Sietsema on hand, Milbank will consume the dishes live on Facebook.
“All of this will be washed down with a good bottle of Trump wine, if such a thing exists, as well as a bottle of antacid,” Milbank said in a video on the Post’s website.
In his column back in October, Milbank wrote that “Americans are better than Trump.”
“No matter what 2015 polls say,” he wrote then, “2016 won’t be the year American democracy murders itself.”
Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, Milbank pointed out that Trump “got 38 percent overall” and the crowded field of GOP candidates, save for Ted Cruz, “never really got one clean shot at him.”
And Milbank has faith that voters will “get it right in the end” and reject Trump in November.
“However, I want to see how my digestion works after I eat the column on Thursday before I commit to eating any further,” he said.
