You’d think the guy who slaps ketchup on well-done steak and reportedly crushes 12 Diet Cokes a day would go for something predictable when it comes to dessert. Chocolate cake, maybe. A slice of New York cheesecake. Something loud and obvious. And sure, Trump does love chocolate cake — he made that very clear during a now-infamous dinner with the president of China. But his actual favorite dessert? The one he demands by name, the one that showed up at his inauguration, the one he gets a bigger serving of than literally everyone else at the table? Cherry vanilla ice cream. Yeah. Cherry vanilla. The flavor your grandma might pick from a Baskin-Robbins menu in 1987. It’s a weirder choice than you’d expect from a man who built gold-plated towers, and it tells you something about how Trump eats — which is to say, exactly how he wants, every single time.
The Two-Scoop Rule That Became a National Story
In 2017, a reporter from TIME Magazine sat down with Trump for dinner at the White House. What they noticed wasn’t some policy bombshell — it was dessert. Trump was served two scoops of ice cream alongside his chocolate cream pie. Everyone else at the table? One scoop. That detail spread across the internet like wildfire. Cable news segments ran on it. Twitter lost its collective mind. It became one of those absurd, only-in-America political stories that somehow tells you everything and nothing at the same time. But here’s the thing — it wasn’t a one-off. White House staff confirmed this was standard protocol. When Trump sat down for dessert, two scoops appeared automatically. No one had to ask. The kitchen just knew.
Cherry Vanilla Is Barely Even a Popular Flavor
Here’s where it gets genuinely odd. Cherry vanilla ice cream is not popular. According to the International Dairy Foods Association’s 2024 rankings, chocolate chip sits comfortably in the top 10 most popular ice cream flavors in the United States. Plain cherry comes in at number 16. Cherry vanilla? It doesn’t even make the list. It’s the ice cream equivalent of ordering a Tab at a restaurant — technically available, but nobody’s really asking for it. A handful of major brands still manufacture it: Blue Bell, Häagen-Dazs, Safeway’s Signature Select line, and Mayfield Creamery. Mayfield actually calls their version “Whitehouse Cherry Vanilla,” though that name predates Trump’s presidency by at least a decade. It’s a niche flavor, which makes Trump’s devotion to it all the more interesting. The man is not exactly known for subtle or unpopular choices.
It Was Literally on the Inauguration Menu
When Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017, the inauguration dinner dessert was cherry vanilla ice cream paired with chocolate soufflé. This wasn’t some random caterer’s pick. Inauguration menus are planned with extreme care, and every item is approved by the incoming president’s team. So the fact that cherry vanilla ice cream shared the spotlight with chocolate soufflé on one of the most important nights in American political life tells you how serious this preference is. He told US Weekly back in 2010 — seven full years before he took office — that cherry vanilla was his flavor. This isn’t a recent thing. This is a lifelong commitment to a deeply unpopular ice cream flavor.
Trump Has His Own Ice Cream Shop (and the Reviews Are Rough)
If you’ve ever wandered through the Trump Tower atrium in Manhattan, you may have noticed Trump Sweets — an ice cream parlor that also sells cookies, cupcakes, and popcorn. It offers 24 different flavors, including, naturally, cherry vanilla. You can get ice cream by the cone, in a cup, or as a shake or sundae. Sounds fine, right? Well, the Yelp reviews tell a different story. Trump Sweets sits at a 2.5-star rating, with reviewers split on whether the ice cream is any good — especially given the prices. One enthusiastic reviewer did single out the cherry vanilla as the must-try flavor. But when your own ice cream shop is pulling two and a half stars on Yelp, the dessert game might need some work.
The Chocolate Cake That Upstaged a Missile Strike
While cherry vanilla ice cream holds the title of Trump’s favorite dessert overall, there’s a strong runner-up: chocolate cake. Specifically, the chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, which is so good that Trump talked about it on national television in the middle of describing a military attack on Syria. During an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump recounted a dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping in April 2017. “We had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” he said, before casually mentioning he’d just ordered a missile strike. The cake became the story. It’s reportedly called the “three-layer Trump chocolate cake,” though the full Mar-a-Lago version is actually a seven-layer beast made by former pastry chef Cedric Barberet, who later opened his own bakery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The Seven-Layer Monster From Mar-a-Lago
Barberet showed Inside Edition exactly how to make the cake that Trump made famous. The recipe is no joke. The cake layers require 337 grams of egg white, 225 grams of granulated sugar, 225 grams of egg yolk, 112 grams of powdered sugar, and 112 grams of high-quality cacao powder. You bring the egg whites to a medium-peak meringue, add the yolks slowly, then bake at 200 degrees Celsius for nine minutes. The filling calls for milk, cream, sugar, yolk, whipped cream, 64% Guayaquil chocolate, and gold leaf gelatin. Seven layers of that. This is not something you’re throwing together on a Tuesday night. And to eat it where Trump eats it, at Mar-a-Lago, you’d need to pay a $200,000 initiation fee — which doubled after Trump’s 2017 inauguration — plus $14,000 in annual dues, plus a few thousand more on food.
Oreos, Vienna Fingers, and the Air Force One Snack Stash
Beyond ice cream and cake, Trump has a well-documented sweet tooth that extends to packaged snacks. Air Force One was reportedly stocked with multiple packages of Oreo cookies, which Trump could eat without worrying about contamination — a concern linked to his long-standing fear of germs. According to The Washington Post, the plane’s cupboards also included Vienna Fingers, potato chips, and pretzels. There’s an interesting twist with the Oreos, though. Trump publicly vowed to stop eating them after their parent company moved some production to Mexico. But he apparently didn’t fully kick the habit. He also reportedly turned to Keebler Vienna Fingers as an alternative — another vanilla-flavored sandwich cookie, which tracks with his overall vanilla obsession. When an aide was asked whether Trump had ever opted for fruit or nuts instead, the response was blunt: “Never seen it.”
See’s Candies and the Full Sweet Tooth Rundown
Trump’s dessert habits extend beyond cookies and ice cream. He’s also a fan of See’s Candies, the California-based company that makes chocolates, lollipops, and toffees. See’s has been around since 1921 and is owned by Berkshire Hathaway — Warren Buffett’s company — so there’s an odd little intersection of two very different American billionaires through a box of candy. At Mar-a-Lago holiday events, the dessert spread is predictably over the top. A Christmas Eve buffet reportedly lined an entire wall of a ballroom with pistachio cakes, peppermint bark, and giant towers of M&Ms. Trump also enjoys McDonald’s shakes in chocolate and vanilla, which fits neatly into his broader fast-food loyalty. His go-to McDonald’s order includes a Filet-O-Fish, and he’s been open about why he likes chain restaurants: he believes the food is safe and consistent, which plays into his germ concerns.
How Trump’s Dessert Obsession Compares to Other Presidents
Trump isn’t the first president with strong feelings about dessert, and he won’t be the last. Joe Biden is also a massive ice cream fan — he once opened a speech by saying he eats more ice cream than three other people combined. Biden’s go-to was Häagen-Dazs vanilla chocolate chip, which the White House kept stocked during his time in office. His favorite shop was Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. But Biden’s flavor preferences were mainstream. Vanilla chocolate chip is a crowd-pleaser. Cherry vanilla is not. That’s what makes Trump’s choice stand out. Throughout American history, presidential dessert preferences have ranged from pies and muffins to cakes and ice cream. Most of them have been pretty safe, familiar choices. Cherry vanilla ice cream — an obscure flavor that can’t even crack the top 16 in popularity rankings — is a genuinely unusual pick. Then again, unusual is kind of the whole brand.
