The New Yorker Promotes Story Seemingly about Diet Coke, Only to Kidnap Readers with an anti-Trump Rant!

 

Although the Coca-Cola Company has always tried to press Diet Coke on hip, scrappy youths, it became, enduringly, the beverage of a generation that emerged across the Clinton years
 

The Decline and Fall of Diet Coke and the Power Generation that Loved It
By Nathan Heller
July 30, 2018
The New Yorker

“Leaking” no longer seems an apt term for what’s coming from the Trump Administration—we will soon require aqueducts to manage these flows—but certain new bits of information can still make a weird splash. The release, last week, of a recorded conversation that Michael Cohen had with Donald Trump, who was then running for President, was notable not only for its discussion of an apparent scheme to acquire the rights to a story about an alleged affair. There was, listeners noted, a desperate drink order in the middle. “Get me a Coke, please!” Trump, a notorious consumer of diet soda, cried as the going became devious.

How the mighty have fallen! And by the mighty, of course, I mean Diet Coke. Recall the soda’s heady ascent in the nineties, in the famous “Diet Coke Break” ad: permed women ogled a construction worker who compulsively removed his shirt to sip his mid-morning refreshment, and the world swooned toward the drinks aisle. Now, it seems, Diet Coke is the elixir of soft-bodied plutocrats desperate to shed their shady pasts and, possibly, a few pounds. Trump, we’re told, guzzles Diet Coke instead of coffee. The Times reports his daily intake to be twelve cans, which, at his reported weight, is two cans shy of the the daily recommended adult human limit for caffeine. Everything seems quite precarious these days, and Diet Coke, as is its wont, has given that precariousness a late-afternoon-style crash of jangly existential panic. “Ahhh” has become “AHHH!,” and along the way the fortunes of America’s favorite power soda have gone flat.

Consider those who rose on Diet Coke’s wings. Besides Trump, one of the most notorious Diet Coke mainliners of recent decades was Harvey Weinstein. Bill Clinton was a known fan (a Diet Coke can is buried in a time capsule at his Presidential library), as were members of his Cabinet (such as Larry Summers). Today, the drink is struggling: its sales have declined yearly since 2006. There is no mystery why. During the late eighties and nineties, Diet Coke seemed less fussy, less patrician, less “Frasier” than second-wave coffee. It helped define a novel archetype of masculinity—the bootstraps kid who’d made it big, who was cool and modern, in a suit—that would later be perverted to support crimes of the sort now finally being recognized. As an office drink and a leisure drink, a daylight beverage and an acceptable cocktail order, Diet Coke was suited to porous work-life boundaries and the leaders who learned to thrive in, and in some cases insidiously exploit, the gray areas of that new world….