The man they call 'Puddin' Finger'

Please permit an indulgence, fair reader. I’d like to note and mark a date for the purpose of establishing that it was me on March 28, 2023, that first publicly suggested that disgraced criminal defendant, worst president in American history and 2024 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump bestow the nickname ‘Puddin’ Finger’ on Ron DeSantis. Now, it must be mentioned that the self-evident perfection of the nickname erodes any possibility of a vanity developing on my part around my sense of originality. Sometimes the obvious is obvious enough. I do not repent of my guiltiest pleasure, which is my recurring, but only slightly occasional, fantasy about being at the MAGA table where the nicknames are laid. Who wouldn’t love to be in the room where that happens? It would be swell if Kimberly Guilfoyle was there. She’d certainly keep it spicy.

I was enjoying the Bulwark ‘The Next Level’ podcast episode called “Ol’ Puddin’ Fingers” with Jonathan V. Last and Sarah Longwell. I like the podcast, and really enjoy watching the Bulwark platform’s expansion. It’s superb. Anyway, even if I didn’t like the Bulwark and the podcast, I would have been drawn in. I would have clicked, listened, watched or taken a lick at all three. There’s something about pudding. 

New York Magazine’s coverage of the pudding issue has been exceptional, prescient and courageous. Many members of the national media are geographically cloistered within a relatively small radius between Manhattan and Washington, DC. They live sheltered lives that are detached from the sensibilities of the great American masses who teem outside their bubbles. Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for Intelligencer at New York Magazine is an exception. She remains rooted to the sensibilities of the American people. She has been gifted with the ability to hear and harness their collective wisdom, while applying it to the great pageant of democracy that is slowly unfolding before America decides whether to end the experiment in 2024. She seems uniquely attuned to the delights of pudding, while maintaining a healthy respect for elemental civilized norms around how to consume the savory delight without disqualifying oneself from high office. She sums it up perfectly:

Chris Christie is forever the governor who berated a guy while clutching an ice-cream cone. The only thing most people remember about Senator Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 presidential bid is that she was accused of eating salad with a comb. Mehmet Oz might be in the Senate today if not for his mistaken belief that Pennsylvanians were worried about the skyrocketing price of crudités.

Now, Ron DeSantis has been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reported that according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers.

From The Daily Beast:

The chatter over DeSantis’ public engagement has also surfaced past unflattering stories about his social skills—particularly, his propensity to devour food during meetings.

He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “always like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.”

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

Hartmann goes on to say that, “At first glance, this may not seem like such a big deal. Pudding is delicious.”

No truer words have ever been spoken. It’s a dirty business, but the business of a dirty finger or fingers caked in the slime of a packaged, plastic, processed pudding is too much. 

This is what Hartmann sees so brilliantly through the tapioca-like fog that has blinded so many of her colleagues. She knows the staying power of processed pudding on three fingers in America, while ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ champion and Meghan Markle stalker Piers Morgan is stuck in a meat pudding of denial around the sketchy DeSantis claims that he doesn’t remember:

DeSantis quickly denied the story, telling Fox Nation’s Piers Morgan, “I don’t remember ever doing that. Maybe when I was a kid.” Then he tried to reframe the pudding rumor as a sign of strength. “It’s interesting there’s a lot of people who when they go at you, sometimes they have really good ammunition like you’re a crook, you did this, you did that. For me, they’re talking about pudding, and I’m like is that really the best you’ve got? Okay, bring it on!”

Here is the money paragraph from Hartmann: 

To be clear, I’m not saying that voters are going to hear this story and instantly decide they can’t vote for DeSantis. But I do think the image will lodge itself in people’s subconsciouses. Pretend you’re a GOP primary voter listening to the Florida governor touting his record on flouting public-health recommendations, harassing migrants, and ridding schools of “wokeness.” Sounds pretty good, right? Now picture those same ideas coming out of a man who’s been credibly accused of licking dessert from his paw like a cartoon bear. How do those talking points sound now?

Exactly.  It sounds really gross by the way. Can you imagine some up-talking Florida governor in white pull-up rubber boots and pudding finger yelling, “Bring it on!” at you? Few Americans can. 

Some may say this alternative lifestyle of Ron Desantis’s will become mainstream, but I think they couldn’t be more wrong. I’ll say this: when I first saw DeSantis wearing these boots I knew something was going on that wasn’t right. Now we know. ‘Puddin’ Finger’ boots. I’m not sure if this is true, but I’m pretty sure ‘Puddin’ Finger’ and “Puss in Boots” are going to get together, somehow. It sounds right and wrong all at once. 

Anyone with sense would imagine that if someone was a practitioner of the pudding finger lifestyle they would be tolerant. They’d have to be. Right? What person so depraved could possibly judge another person, company or anything really?

It’s hard to imagine gubernatorial predecessors like Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist going three fingers deep in the pudding cup. As Trump pointed out, Jeb likely would have lacked the energy to lick the spoon. It’s unprecedented behavior.

Speaking of pudding or puddin,’ I can’t make up my mind. 

Being a native of New Jersey, I speak in the flat thud of the mid-Atlantic accent. I drop my “t’s” and my “g’s.” “Clinton” has always been a hard word. Hard as I tried, I only pronounced it correctly a handful of times on television. “Bill Clin’n loves puddin’” is how it comes out. I have to be really focused to deliver a more elegant one: “Bill Clinton loves pudding.”

When I first read the ground-breaking report of DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers it made me think of the glass bowls we would eat vanilla pudding out of in North Plainfield, NJ. We called them pudding bowls, but looking back on it, I remember a great aunt we called “Chuchie” using them to slug down giant helpings of Grand Marnier. The bowls used to cool with Saran Wrap over them in the refrigerator. I used to fight with my sister about who could pull the Saran Wrap off the pudding. I hated scraping that pudding film off the top, but I certainly never used my fingers. When it came time to eat it, we used spoons. 

I pictured DeSantis swirling his fingers around a nice glass bowl and licking them with delight. I was completely unprepared for the plastic chocolate Jell-O pudding featured in the Trump commercial. It wasn’t a fancy pudding at all. It was (now disgraced) Bill Cosby cheap-ass plastic box pudding. It wasn’t a tapioca, bread, banana, rice or anything pleasing pudding.

Last year, Ron Desantis’s wife made a campaign ad comparing him to god. I guess that makes pudding the food of the gods.

By the way, many people, including me, don’t want Trump’s finger anywhere near the nuclear button, but according to the polls, even more people don’t want DeSantis and his dirty fingers near any button. Yuck. If an Uber driver wouldn’t let you in his car for being too dirty then it probably has political implications if you want to be commander in chief. Let’s look at the Trump ad:

Margaret Hartmann isn’t just spot on in her analysis; she’s deeply honest. She admits to being drawn into Trump’s ode to pudding and feeling delighted by the end of the licking. It’s ok. She is not alone. Resistance is futile. Her writing is poignant around her trepidations about enjoying such a forbidden pudding. I’m with her. Such delight does not come without torment. 

The thing to remember about the coming MAGA campaign primary season is that it leaves all normal people with only three options. The first is total indifference. That’s not for me, or millions of others. The second is rooting for all of the MAGA candidates to lose. The third is rooting for all of the MAGA candidates to win. When you think about it, they are really the same thing. Therefore, even if Trump is deranged, completely delusional and calling for civil war, his point about the pudding remains his first unifying message in almost eight years. I choose to see the progress. 

“Let us go forth from this moment, united as a divided people over the last common bond we share. Let us resolve to keep our fingers out of the pudding for this time, for a long time, for all time. Let us work together.” I have no doubt whatsoever that Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller could write something like that. The MAGA crowd would go crazy. If they got smoke and lasers Trump could even look heroic. Who knows? 

There are a lot of handshakes for Ron DeSantis between today and the New Hampshire primary. Here’s a word to the wise for folks in the Granite State: unpack the sanitizer and get out the wet wipes because Ron DeSantis is coming to town. Oh, and maybe tell him about the state motto. It’s LIVE FREE OR DIE. Suggest perhaps that he keep his pudding fingers off of the library books. It’s a free country, after all. Or is it, Puddin’ Finger?

Either way, pudding is a pleasing word. It does, however, make for dirty fingers, and the one thing that is true about Trump’s small and feral hands is that they are clean as a whistle — though recently stained by the fingerprint ink.

Ron Desantis attacked the Special Olympics gratuitously and unfairly in Florida. He’s a bully, who has created his own extremist Olympics in a low-rent coliseum that houses the Florida legislature. It is there where an abortion ban has been passed that sets a six-week deadline for women to legally end their pregnancy — if they even know they are pregnant at that point. Ron DeSantis apparently wants to be America’s ob-gyn. He wants to give America’s women a helping hand with their pregnancies, and join them in the delivery room, bedroom, exam room, confessional, or really any place where they might decide what to do for themselves and their lives. Here’s the thing, as grateful as America’s women no doubt are for his love and guiding spirit, he has pudding fingers and that’s disgusting. You don’t have to spend all day on GOOP to know that’s a no-no. 

Ron DeSantis went to New Hampshire and announced, “I have just begun to fight.” He was feeling flush and apparently nautical with his adoption of John Paul Jones’s famous assertion of defiance, while outnumbered in naval battle against superior British vessels during the Revolutionary War. Refusing to surrender, the 32-year-old captain thundered, “I have not yet begun to fight.” 

Many have wondered how did John Paul Jones become a ship’s captain at age 21? Why did his men rally to his command? It’s simple. He never ate pudding with his fingers in front of them. Never. 

“Like an animal.” Indeed.