President Donald Trump’s boast that he could flatten Barack Obama in an election handed a CNN panel its punchline, and it arrived in the shape of a Big Mac.
A panel on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” took turns at the president on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026, over his claim that he would beat former President Barack Obama in a hypothetical presidential race, a boast the 80-year-old made on a podcast hosted by Stephen A. Smith.
Trump set the whole thing off on “Straight Shooter,” Smith’s podcast. “Yeah, I think I’d beat him easily,” the president said of the matchup, adding that he considers Obama “highly overrated.”
He went further in the same interview, telling Smith that Obama had not been a “good president” and was, in his view, more of a “divider,” while he himself “brings people together.”
The One Contest He’d Win
Iraq War veteran and national security commentator Paul Rieckhoff did not let the claim pass. “Donald Trump would beat Barack Obama in a Big Mac eating contest,” Rieckhoff quipped. “I mean, I don’t think there’s much else he’d beat him in right now. Definitely not a popularity contest.”
He kept going, describing Obama as “maybe the most effective communicator of our time” and delivering a verdict on the president’s chances against him. “This is not a fight he’s going to win,” Rieckhoff said.
Four Food Groups on Trump Force One
Trump’s love of fast food, and of McDonald’s above all, has been chronicled throughout his political career, and some of the best-known accounts come from people in his own orbit. The 2017 book “Let Trump Be Trump,” co-written by former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, described “four major food groups” aboard Trump Force One: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza and Diet Coke.
The habit has been photographed at the White House as well. One image shows the president accepting a McDonald’s delivery outside the Oval Office in April. Another, released by his campaign, shows him with a McDonald’s meal shortly after his election win.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters has described his shock that the president’s palate had not matured by the 2024 campaign. Gruters recalled flying with Trump to a campaign event that year, during which the president devoured French fries, a Quarter Pounder, a Big Mac and a Filet-O-Fish.
The network’s interest in what Trump eats has drawn return fire before. Its coverage of his eating habits, including his food options in India, prompted conservative criticism in February 2020.
What the Midterms Already Told Him
CNN political commentator Jamal Simmons called the president’s Obama remarks “ludicrous.” Simmons said the last campaign came close to producing a direct confrontation between the two men — “mano a mano,” as he put it — and that Obama’s criticism appeared to send Trump into “a little bit of a spiral.”
The mockery did not come only from the president’s usual opponents. Republican strategist Maura Gillespie accused Trump of trying to “rewrite history in real time,” and she called the midterms themselves “a massive rebuke.”
He Still Won’t Forgive His Enemies
The broadside at Obama followed another interview in which the president drew a hard line of his own. He told Ross Douthat, who questioned him for “60 Minutes,” that he cannot forgive his political enemies, and said he hates some of them and always will.
Douthat pressed him on whether he could find it in his heart to forgive them even if forgiveness were the price of entering heaven. Trump would not give the answer, maintaining that saying he could forgive them “wouldn’t be real.”
