You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals
Hanging prominently on one of the walls is The Peacemakers, a painting that depicts an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President Abraham Lincoln and his three service chiefs — Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. One hundred fifty-two years after Lincoln hatched plans to preserve the Union, President Trump’s advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to try to preserve the world order.
By that point, six months into his administration, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed by gaping holes in Trump’s knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II. Trump had dismissed allies as worthless, cozied up to authoritarian regimes in Russia and elsewhere, and advocated withdrawing troops from strategic outposts and active theaters alike.
Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of “America First,” but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America’s superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history and, even, where countries were located. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to create a basic knowledge, a shared language.
So on July 20, 2017, Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial. What happened inside the Tank that day crystallized the commander in chief’s berating, derisive and dismissive manner, foreshadowing decisions such as the one earlier this month that brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. The Tank meeting was a turning point in Trump’s presidency. Rather than getting him to appreciate America’s traditional role and alliances, Trump began to tune out and eventually push away the experts who believed their duty was to protect the country by restraining his more dangerous impulses.
The episode has been documented numerous times, but subsequent reporting reveals a more complete picture of the moment and the chilling effect Trump’s comments and hostility had on the nation’s military and national security leadership.
Just before 10 a.m. on a scorching summer Thursday, Trump arrived at the Pentagon. He stepped out of his motorcade, walked along a corridor with portraits honoring former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, and stepped inside the Tank. The uniformed officers greeted their commander in chief. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. sat in the seat of honor midway down the table, because this was his room, and Trump sat at the head of the table facing a projection screen. Mattis and the newly confirmed deputy defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, sat to the president’s left, with Vice President Pence and Tillerson to his right. Down the table sat the leaders of the military branches, along with Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon was in the outer ring of chairs with other staff, taking his seat just behind Mattis and directly in Trump’s line of sight.
Mattis, Cohn, and Tillerson and their aides decided to use maps, graphics, and charts to tutor the president, figuring they would help keep him from getting bored. Mattis opened with a slide show punctuated by lots of dollar signs. Mattis devised a strategy to use terms the impatient president, schooled in real estate, would appreciate to impress upon him the value of U.S. investments abroad. He sought to explain why U.S. troops were deployed in so many regions and why America’s safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe.
An opening line flashed on the screen, setting the tone: “The post-war international rules-based order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation.” Mattis then gave a 20-minute briefing on the power of the NATO alliance to stabilize Europe and keep the United States safe. Bannon thought to himself, “Not good. Trump is not going to like that one bit.” The internationalist language Mattis was using was a trigger for Trump.
“Oh, baby, this is going to be f---ing wild,” Bannon thought. “If you stood up and threatened to shoot [Trump], he couldn’t say ‘postwar rules-based international order.’ It’s just not the way he thinks.”
For the next 90 minutes, Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn took turns trying to emphasize their points, pointing to their charts and diagrams. They showed where U.S. personnel were positioned, at military bases, CIA stations, and embassies, and how U.S. deployments fended off the threats of terror cells, nuclear blasts, and destabilizing enemies in places including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Korea Peninsula, and Syria. Cohn spoke for about 20 minutes about the value of free trade with America’s allies, emphasizing how he saw each trade agreement working together as part of an overall structure to solidify U.S. economic and national security.
Trump appeared peeved by the schoolhouse vibe but also allergic to the dynamic of his advisers talking at him. His ricocheting attention span led him to repeatedly interrupt the lesson. He heard an adviser say a word or phrase and then seized on that to interject with his take. For instance, the word “base” prompted him to launch in to say how “crazy” and “stupid” it was to pay for bases in some countries.
Trump’s first complaint was to repeat what he had vented about to his national security adviser months earlier: South Korea should pay for a $10 billion missile defense system that the United States built for it. The system was designed to shoot down any short- and medium-range ballistic missiles from North Korea to protect South Korea and American troops stationed there. But Trump argued that the South Koreans should pay for it, proposing that the administration pull U.S. troops out of the region or bill the South Koreans for their protection.
“We should charge them rent,” Trump said of South Korea. “We should make them pay for our soldiers. We should make money off of everything.”
Trump proceeded to explain that NATO, too, was worthless. U.S. generals were letting the allied member countries get away with murder, he said, and they owed the United States a lot of money after not living up to their promise of paying their dues.
“They’re in arrears,” Trump said, reverting to the language of real estate. He lifted both his arms at his sides in frustration. Then he scolded top officials for the untold millions of dollars he believed they had let slip through their fingers by allowing allies to avoid their obligations.
“We are owed money you haven’t been collecting!” Trump told them. “You would totally go bankrupt if you had to run your own business.”
Mattis wasn’t trying to convince the president of anything, only to explain and provide facts. Now things were devolving quickly. The general tried to calmly explain to the president that he was not quite right. The NATO allies didn’t owe the United States back rent, he said. The truth was more complicated. NATO had a nonbinding goal that members should pay at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their defenses. Only five of the countries currently met that goal, but it wasn’t as if they were shorting the United States on the bill.
More broadly, Mattis argued, the NATO alliance was not serving only to protect western Europe. It protected America, too. “This is what keeps us safe,” Mattis said. Cohn tried to explain to Trump that he needed to see the value of the trade deals. “These are commitments that help keep us safe,” Cohn said.
Bannon interjected. “Stop, stop, stop,” he said. “All you guys talk about all these great things, they’re all our partners, I want you to name me now one country and one company that’s going to have his back.”
Trump then repeated a threat he’d made countless times before. He wanted out of the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama had struck in 2015, which called for Iran to reduce its uranium stockpile and cut its nuclear program.
“It’s the worst deal in history!” Trump declared.
“Well, actually . . .,” Tillerson interjected.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Trump said, cutting off the secretary of state before he could explain some of the benefits of the agreement. “They’re cheating. They’re building. We’re getting out of it. I keep telling you, I keep giving you time, and you keep delaying me. I want out of it.”
Before they could debate the Iran deal, Trump erupted to revive another frequent complaint: the war in Afghanistan, which was now America’s longest war. He demanded an explanation for why the United States hadn’t won in Afghanistan yet, now 16 years after the nation began fighting there in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump unleashed his disdain, calling Afghanistan a “loser war.” That phrase hung in the air and disgusted not only the military leaders at the table but also the men and women in uniform sitting along the back wall behind their principals. They all were sworn to obey their commander in chief’s commands, and here he was calling the war they had been fighting a loser war.
“You’re all losers,” Trump said. “You don’t know how to win anymore.”
Trump questioned why the United States couldn’t get some oil as payment for the troops stationed in the Persian Gulf. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off,” Trump boomed. “Where is the f---ing oil?”
Trump seemed to be speaking up for the voters who elected him, and several attendees thought they heard Bannon in Trump’s words. Bannon had been trying to persuade Trump to withdraw forces by telling him, “The American people are saying we can’t spend a trillion dollars a year on this. We just can’t. It’s going to bankrupt us.”
“And not just that, the deplorables don’t want their kids in the South China Sea at the 38th parallel or in Syria, in Afghanistan, in perpetuity,” Bannon would add, invoking Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” reference to Trump supporters.
Trump mused about removing General John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in charge of troops in Afghanistan. “I don’t think he knows how to win,” the president said, impugning Nicholson, who was not present at the meeting.
Dunford tried to come to Nicholson’s defense, but the mild-mannered general struggled to convey his points to the irascible president.
“Mr. President, that’s just not . . .,” Dunford started. “We’ve been under different orders.”
Dunford sought to explain that he hadn’t been charged with annihilating the enemy in Afghanistan but was instead following a strategy started by the Obama administration to gradually reduce the military presence in the country in hopes of training locals to maintain a stable government so that eventually the United States could pull out. Trump shot back in more plain language.
“I want to win,” he said. “We don’t win any wars anymore . . . We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.”
Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. Indeed, they have not been reported until now.
“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass.
Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. “How does the commander in chief say that?” one thought. “What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?”
This was a president who had been labeled a “draft dodger” for avoiding service in the Vietnam War under questionable circumstances. Trump was a young man born of privilege and in seemingly perfect health: six feet two inches with a muscular build and a flawless medical record. He played several sports, including football. Then, in 1968 at age 22, he obtained a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that exempted him from military service just as the United States was drafting men his age to fulfill massive troop deployments to Vietnam.
Tillerson in particular was stunned by Trump’s diatribe and began visibly seething. For too many minutes, others in the room noticed, he had been staring straight, dumbfounded, at Mattis, who was speechless, his head bowed down toward the table. Tillerson thought to himself, “Gosh darn it, Jim, say something. Why aren’t you saying something?”
But, as he would later tell close aides, Tillerson realized in that moment that Mattis was genetically a Marine, unable to talk back to his commander in chief, no matter what nonsense came out of his mouth.
The more perplexing silence was from Pence, a leader who should have been able to stand up to Trump. Instead, one attendee thought, “He’s sitting there frozen like a statue. Why doesn’t he stop the president?” Another recalled the vice president was “a wax museum guy.” From the start of the meeting, Pence looked as if he wanted to escape and put an end to the president’s torrent. Surely, he disagreed with Trump’s characterization of military leaders as “dopes and babies,” considering his son, Michael, was a Marine first lieutenant then training for his naval aviator wings. But some surmised Pence feared getting crosswise with Trump. “A total deer in the headlights,” recalled a third attendee.
Others at the table noticed Trump’s stream of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn’t stand it another minute. His voice broke into Trump’s tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops.
“No, that’s just wrong,” the secretary of state said. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.”
Tillerson’s father and uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service.
“The men and women who put on a uniform don’t do it to become soldiers of fortune,” Tillerson said. “That’s not why they put on a uniform and go out and die . . . They do it to protect our freedom.”
There was silence in the Tank. Several military officers in the room were grateful to the secretary of state for defending them when no one else would. The meeting soon ended and Trump walked out, saying goodbye to a group of servicemen lining the corridor as he made his way to his motorcade waiting outside. Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn were deflated. Standing in the hall with a small cluster of people he trusted, Tillerson finally let down his guard.
“He’s a f---ing moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.
The plan by Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn to train the president to appreciate the internationalist view had clearly backfired.
“We were starting to get out on the wrong path, and we really needed to have a course correction and needed to educate, to teach, to help him understand the reason and basis for a lot of these things,” said one senior official involved in the planning. “We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct. Everybody was on board, 100 percent agreed with that sentiment. [But] they were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”
A few days later, Pence’s national security adviser, Andrea Thompson, a retired Army colonel who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq, reached out to thank Tillerson for speaking up on behalf of the military and the public servants who had been in the Tank. By September 2017, she would leave the White House and join Tillerson at Foggy Bottom as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.
The Tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret. At the Aspen Security Forum two days later, longtime NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Dunford how Trump had interacted during the Tank meeting. The Joint Chiefs chairman misleadingly described the meeting, skipping over the fireworks.
“He asked a lot of hard questions, and the one thing he does is question some fundamental assumptions that we make as military leaders — and he will come in and question those,” Dunford told Mitchell on July 22. “It’s a pretty energetic and an interactive dialogue.”
One victim of the Tank meeting was Trump’s relationship with Tillerson, which forever after was strained. The secretary of state came to see it as the beginning of the end. It would only worsen when news that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” was first reported in October 2017 by NBC News.
Trump once again gathered his generals and top diplomats in December 2017 for a meeting as part of the administration’s ongoing strategy talks about troop deployments in Afghanistan in the Situation Room, a secure meeting room on the ground floor of the West Wing. Trump didn’t like the Situation Room as much as the Pentagon’s Tank, because he didn’t think it had enough gravitas. It just wasn’t impressive.
But there Trump was, struggling to come up with a new Afghanistan policy and frustrated that so many U.S. forces were deployed in so many places around the world. The conversation began to tilt in the same direction as it had in the Tank back in July.
“All these countries need to start paying us for the troops we are sending to their countries. We need to be making a profit,” Trump said. “We could turn a profit on this.”
Dunford tried to explain to the president once again, gently, that troops deployed in these regions provided stability there, which helped make America safer. Another officer chimed in that charging other countries for U.S. soldiers would be against the law.
“But it just wasn’t working,” one former Trump aide recalled. “Nothing worked.”
Following the Tank meeting, Tillerson had told his aides that he would never silently tolerate such demeaning talk from Trump about making money off the deployments of U.S. soldiers. Tillerson’s father, at the age of 17, had committed to enlist in the Navy on his next birthday, wanting so much to serve his country in World War II. His great-uncle was a career officer in the Navy as well. Both men had been on his mind, Tillerson told aides, when Trump unleashed his tirade in the Tank and again when he repeated those points in the Situation Room in December.
“We need to get our money back,” Trump told his assembled advisers.
That was it. Tillerson stood up. But when he did so, he turned his back to the president and faced the flag officers and the rest of the aides in the room. He didn’t want a repeat of the scene in the Tank.
“I’ve never put on a uniform, but I know this,” Tillerson said. “Every person who has put on a uniform, the people in this room, they don’t do it to make a buck. They did it for their country, to protect us. I want everyone to be clear about how much we as a country value their service.”
Tillerson’s rebuke made Trump angry. He got a little red in the face. But the president decided not to engage Tillerson at that moment. He would wait to take him on another day.
Later that evening, after 8:00, Tillerson was working in his office at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, preparing for the next day. The phone rang. It was Dunford. The Joint Chiefs chairman’s voice was unsteady with emotion. Dunford had much earlier joked with Tillerson that in past administrations the secretaries of state and Defense Department leaders wouldn’t be caught dead walking on the same side of the street, for their rivalry was that fierce. But now, as both men served Trump, they were brothers joined against what they saw as disrespect for service members. Dunford thanked Tillerson for standing up for them in the Situation Room.
“You took the body blows for us,” Dunford said. “Punch after punch. Thank you. I will never forget it.”
Tillerson, Dunford, and Mattis would not take those body blows for much longer. They failed to rein in Trump’s impulses or to break through what they regarded as the president’s stubborn, even dangerous insistence that he knew best. Piece by piece, the guardrails that had hemmed in the chaos of Trump’s presidency crumpled.
In March 2018, Trump abruptly fired Tillerson while the secretary of state was halfway across the globe on a sensitive diplomatic mission to Africa to ease tensions caused by Trump’s demeaning insults about African countries. Trump gave Tillerson no rationale for his firing, and afterward acted as if they were buddies, inviting him to come by the Oval Office to take a picture and have the president sign it. Tillerson never went.
Mattis continued serving as the defense secretary, but the president’s sudden decision in December 2018 to withdraw troops from Syria and abandon America’s Kurdish allies there — one the president soon reversed, only to remake 10 months later — inspired him to resign. Mattis saw Trump’s desired withdrawal as an assault on a soldier’s code. “He began to feel like he was becoming complicit,” recalled one of the secretary’s confidants.
The media interpretation of Mattis’ resignation letter as a scathing rebuke of Trump’s worldview brought the president’s anger to a boiling point. Trump decided to remove Mattis two months ahead of the secretary’s chosen departure date. His treatment of Mattis upset the secretary’s staff. They decided to arrange the biggest clap out they could. The event was a tradition for all departing secretaries. They wanted a line of Pentagon personnel that stretched for a mile applauding Mattis as he left for the last time. It was going to be “yuge,” staffers joked, borrowing from Trump’s glossary.
But Mattis would not allow it.
“No, we are not doing that,” he told his aides. “You don’t understand the president. I work with him. You don’t know him like I do. He will take it out on Shanahan and Dunford.”
Dunford stayed on until September 2019, retiring at the conclusion of his four-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One of Dunford’s first public acts after leaving office was to defend a military officer attacked by Trump, Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who testified in the House impeachment inquiry about his worries over Trump’s conduct with Ukraine. Trump dismissed Vindman as a “Never Trumper,” but Dunford stepped forward to praise the Purple Heart recipient as “a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer. He has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation.”
By then, however, Trump had become a president entirely unrestrained. He had replaced his raft of seasoned advisers with a cast of enablers who executed his orders and engaged his obsessions. They saw their mission as telling the president yes.
Make healthy eating a reality with this delicious 28-day plan
Year after year, “dieting and eating healthier” tops the list of most common New Year’s resolutions for Americans. But this is a different kind of healthy eating challenge from others you might see in January. We’re not here to tell you to follow a specific kind of eating plan, nor are we ever going to focus on eating for a certain kind of body. Instead, we want to help you prioritize whole foods over processed ones, and make doing so super simple so you might consider keeping it up throughout the year.
Why? Simply put, it’s one of the few healthy eating “golden rules” that experts can agree on, no matter if they’re a fan of Paleo or keto or the Mediterranean diet. And it’s something that can be adapted to nearly any way of eating, regardless of a person’s unique nutritional or dietary needs.
But it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew when working towards a new goal, no matter how gung-ho you feel on January 1. Because it takes 28 days to build a habit, we’ve set up our food challenge to give you a piece of actionable advice every single day for the next four weeks, all with the goal of getting you to eat more whole foods while meeting your own individual healthy eating goals along the way.
Ready to join us on four weeks of change? It all starts on January 5. Read up on the plans, sign up for our newsletter* (in the box below), and sync the plan to your calendar. Your healthy eating goals are so close, you can almost taste them.
Keep reading for the full 28-day healthy eating challenge: 
Graphic: W+G Creative Day 1: Set your goals
Think about what healthy eating habits you want to change or implement in your own life today, and write them down. As mentioned, we’re encouraging everyone to eat more whole foods and fewer processed foods, but what does that look like for you?
Brigitte Zeitlin, MPH, RD, CDN and founder of BZ Nutrition in New York, recommends whittling down broader goals into something more specific that you can “count and measure” in order to stay accountable. “For example, you can say that you want to never skip breakfast, which is something small that you can count and quantify. It’s a tweak that’s going to make a huge impact,” she says.
It’s also important to keep your goals focused on behaviors, not specific foods, to avoid falling into a restrictive mindset, says Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, the owner of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a virtual private practice that specializes in intuitive eating. “I recommend asking yourself: Am I hoping this resolution will change my body? Am I only removing things from my life, or am I adding? Am I attempting to change a behavior or an outcome?” How you answer can help you figure out whether a potential goal is coming from a healthy place or not.
You should also think about your lifestyle and how your eating patterns fit into it. “The whole point is to make these habits last all 12 months,” says Zeitlin; if you’re setting goals that don’t mesh with how you realistically want to live, you likely won’t be able to stick to them. For example, if you like to eat out a lot with your friends, saying you’ll cook every single meal for yourself probably isn’t feasible. But if you decide that you want to cook at least one meal per day, that still gives you some flexibility to have social time with your friends without overhauling your life.
Day 2: Start a food diary
Zeitlin suggests spending a full week, including weekends, tracking what you eat and drink to get a more holistic picture of your typical eating habits. You don’t need to track calories, portion sizes, or macros—Zeitlin says just jotting what you ate and drank and the time of day you ate it is enough. The exception: beverages. “We do want to know if you’re having eight glasses of water or if you’re having eight glasses of wine,” she says.
Why start a food journal? Having a clearer picture of your current eating habits will make it easier to make goals that are relevant to you and your needs—which may help you tweak or revise those goals you set on Day 1.
Day 3: Assess your sugar intake
It’s universally accepted at this point that excess sugar consumption is a major risk factor for inflammation, diabetes, and heart disease, yet it’s still a huge part of most people’s diets. Per the American Heart Association, adult women should eat no more than 25 grams (about six teaspoons) of added sugar per day, but most of us consume about three times that amount.
That’s why as part of your food diary, Zeitlin says it’s a good idea to track all of your sources of sugar, from the healthy (fruits and grains) to the more decadent, and assess where your sugar is coming from in a given day or week. Then, rework your eating habits so that your sugar intake reaches the recommended levels—without cutting everything out.
“If you’re someone who wants your overall sugar intake for the day to have something sweet, all you have to do is know that about yourself,” says Zeitlin. “Then we work backwards. Every night after dinner you have one ounce of dark chocolate, fantastic. Then the rest of your day, make sure that you’re having no more than two cups of fruit a day and no more than two cups of grain a day.” Approaching it in this way leaves room for dessert while keeping your overall sugar levels in check.
Day 4: Do a fridge and pantry inventory
Healthy eating of course starts with what you have in your fridge and kitchen. Often what we have on hand in our own environments helps inform the food choices we make. “If your pantry and fridge are stocked with lots of healthy, easy food options, you’ll be a lot less likely to cave,” Kimberly Snyder, CN, previously told Well+Good.
Take a look today at what foods you currently have on your shelves and look for patterns. How much of it is fresh versus packaged? How much of it is plants? How much of it qualifies as processed? Note that down and aim to cut back on the processed stuff and replace it with fresh or minimally-processed goods. And ditch items that are expired or that contain artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, or high fructose corn syrup.
Day 5: Stock up on healthy supplies and groceries
Now that you’ve seen the areas of your kitchen that need filling in, it’s time to take a trip to the grocery store to load up on new supplies. Some general things to keep in mind when shopping for healthy food: Buy produce that’s in season, choose minimally-processed foods with short ingredients lists, and buy only what you truly plan on cooking. “Nothing is more debilitating than buying a whole bunch of fresh vegetables and then throwing them out when you can’t cook them all before they go bad,” says Zeitlin. She encourages everyone to make a list of exactly what they intend on cooking and sticking with it at the grocery store.
Some of Zeitlin’s favorite staples that she always has in her kitchen: almond butter, tomato sauce, olive oil, parmesan cheese, spinach, blueberries or some other form of fruit, and dark chocolate.
Day 6: Enjoy a produce item you’ve never tried before
Take a baby step towards eating more whole foods today and eat a produce item that you’ve never had before. Bonus points if it’s in season!
Day 7: Practice reframing your internal food talk
Healthy eating is about more than what you consume; it’s about how you relate to food, too. “A good relationship with food means that food has no moral code,” says Zeitlin. Yet for many people, food choices are often complicated by feelings of guilt or shame—which can have damaging effects on our psyche. “Categorizing foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ can cause some mental restriction, where we feel badly after eating ‘bad foods’ and then tell ourselves we’ll never eat that way again,” says Rumsey. It can lead to a cycle of restricting foods, then bingeing on those foods, then feeling guilty about overdoing it and working to restrict again—a cycle that is unhealthy for physical and mental health, she says.
It can take time and practice to neutralize your internal dialogue, says Rumsey. Start today (and keep it up every day after) by actively questioning and challenging your thoughts about food. If you find yourself thinking that you “shouldn’t” eat something, for example, ask yourself why. Is it because you think the food is “bad” or because you truly don’t feel like eating it? If it’s the former, tune out your judgy thoughts, eat the food, and pay attention to how it makes you feel after (and, you guessed it, put it in your food journal).
Day 8: Commit to eating 30 plants over the course of this week
Research shows that people who regularly eat at least 30 different kinds of plants—including fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, and herbs—have the healthiest guts. Boost your own gut health by committing to eating 30 different plant foods this week. The number seems daunting, but remember that this isn’t just focused exclusively on fruits and veggies. If you add some chia seeds and berries onto your yogurt in the morning, make a grain bowl with roasted sweet potato and kale for lunch, snack on an apple and some nut butter in the afternoon, and add cauliflower mash and sautéed spinach to your roasted salmon for dinner, you’re already a third of the way there in one day.
Day 9: Replace one processed snack or food today with a whole-food alternative
As part of our quest to eat more whole foods and fewer processed foods, take a snack or food you plan to eat and replace it with a whole-foods alternative. So if you typically reach for a protein bar at 3 p.m., try eating a handful of nuts with a piece of fruit instead, says Zeitlin. Some other whole-food snacks she loves: hard boiled eggs, half of an avocado, or part-skim string cheese with carrots, grapes, or a pear.
Day 10: Identify your “top 3”
Eating a variety of foods is one of the foundations of a healthy diet—not just for the above-mentioned gut-health benefits, but because each whole food comes with its own unique nutritional profile. “All of our fruits and vegetables are different colors because of the different amounts of vitamins and minerals they have,” says Zeitlin. By eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, you get a variety of vitamins and minerals in your diet, from potassium and magnesium to vitamins C and K. Same goes for protein sources, she says—they all offer different amounts of protein as well as nutrients like iron and omega-3 fatty acids.
Today, actively introduce variety into your diet by identifying the top three fruits, vegetables, and proteins that you eat most often. Then challenge yourself to find a fourth of each to add into your meals today. So if you often gravitate towards salmon, try another fish like halibut or tuna. If you only ever eat spinach, try out arugula or baby kale instead. Try this trick again whenever you feel like you’re stuck in a food rut.
Day 11: Add an extra serving of fiber
Considering that most women only eat about 15 grams of fiber per day (just over half of the recommended daily intake), everyone could stand to add another serving of fiber to their meals. “Fiber is important for regulating blood sugars [and] regulating bowel movements,” says McKel Kooienga, MS, RDN, LDN, founder of Nutrition Stripped. “Some [fiber-rich] foods are prebiotic foods, meaning they feed the good bacteria in our gut, and fiber has been shown to help decrease cholesterol, improve cardiovascular health, and more.”
Start adding in more fiber today in the form of an extra serving of leafy green vegetables, legumes instead of meat as your protein, or sprinkling chia seeds on your morning oatmeal or yogurt. (And yes, because we’re all about whole foods sources of nutrients, skip the supplements or powders.) Now that you’ve got a good fiber thing going, keep up this extra serving throughout the rest of the month.
Day 12: Swap out something with meat for a plant-based protein
Most health experts agree that all of us could stand to eat less meat for health and environmental reasons. But you don’t have to go completely cold turkey (no pun intended) in order to reap the benefits. Start by replacing one meat-containing meal today with a plant-based protein, suggests Kooienga. She’s a fan of Start adding in more fiber today , but really any whole-foods, plant-based protein works.
Day 13: Practice mindfulness during meals
Mindfulness isn’t just for your meditation app—it’s a crucial part of healthy eating, says Rumsey. “Mindful eating is being conscious of what you are eating and why. It’s about getting back in touch with the experience of eating and enjoying your food,” she says. This can promote a more loving, intuitive relationship with food.
Put it into practice by adding a “pause” before each meal or snack, Rumsey says. “Use this pause as a time to check in with your body. How are you feeling? What are you feeling? How hungry are you? What food sounds good to you? This non-judgemental curiosity helps you connect with your body in order to respond to needs and desires.”
Day 14: Eat at least one type of “sea” food
Fun fact: 85 percent of Americans don’t eat the recommended eight ounces of seafood per week. That’s a BFD, considering all the benefits that fish and shellfish offer in the form of protein, omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins, and more. Consider this motivation to buy a serving of salmon, tuna, or any of your other favorite kind of fish and cook it tonight for dinner. (These healthy fish recipes should serve as some worthy inspo.)
Vegans, you’re not off the hook—it’s crucial that everyone gets their share of omega-3s and B-vitamins from ocean foods. Add some spirulina powder to your smoothie, sprinkle algae flakes (called dulse) onto your breakfast, or crunch on some seaweed snacks to get similar benefits.
Day 15: Take stock of your cooking knowledge
Unless you want to eat everything raw (which… is not recommended), a huge part of eating more whole foods is being more comfortable and confident in the kitchen. You don’t need to have a degree from Le Cordon Bleu, but it is important to master a few baseline skills. “Start with a high-quality chef’s knife and learn basic knife skills—this will completely transform how you cook at home!” says Kooienga. (YouTube tutorials are your friend.)
Knowing how to make rice or other cooked grains is another key fundamental skill. So is roasting and broiling, says Zeitlin. “Broiling is super easy—all you have to turn that oven notch to broil and not much else,” she says. Plus, it’s a good way to quickly cook proteins, from chicken and salmon to tofu. “It’s very versatile, not super labor intensive, and yet goes a long way,” she adds.
If any of these things are a mystery to you, take advantage of your Sunday to practice them at home. Your future cooking efforts will thank you.
Day 16: Commit to cooking 3 dinners this week
Again, part of embracing eating more whole, unprocessed foods is cooking. This week, say yes to cooking at least three dinners for yourself. (We have suggestions on how to do that in the days ahead.) Set cal reminders, go grocery shopping today, do whatever it is you need to do to make cooking in some form happen this week.
Day 17: Try a new spice you’ve never used before
Consistency can be great when you’re trying to establish new habits, says Zeitlin. But consistency with food can also get boring—which is where flavor enhancers like spices can come in. Shop the spice section at Trader Joe’s or your favorite grocery store to find new seasonings to experiment with. Or combine spices you like in different ways—like mixing ground ginger and chili powder to put on a salmon bowl—to excite your taste buds. Plus, spices can count towards that “30 plants a week” goal.
Day 18: Roast a tray of vegetables
Roasting is another crucial cooking skill, so test your hand at it this evening by roasting a tray of any vegetables you like. “You can take any vegetable, toss it in olive oil, sprinkle salt and pepper, bake at 350-400 degrees F for 30 minutes, and be good to go,” says Kooienga. “Every vegetable is different depending on their water content, so you’ll just have to keep an eye out for the vegetable to get soft, golden brown, or crispy depending on the desired texture.” If you’re an old hat at this, upgrade to a sheet-pan dinner that roasts vegetables alongside a healthy protein of choice.
Day 19: DIY a sauce or salad dressing
Another easy way to add flavor to foods: sauces and dressings. Since store-bought options often contain extra additives and hidden sugars, DIY your own today instead and store it in the fridge. Then just whip it out and add a teaspoon or two onto meals that need more oomph. Mastering this now will also come in handy for next week’s tasks.
Some sauce recipes to try:
Day 20: Cook with an item of seasonal produce as your main ingredient
Check out your farmer’s market today to see what’s in season—in January, that typically means citrus fruits, butternut and acorn squashes, and Brussels sprouts—and take something home to cook with. “You’re not only supporting local farmers who take care of the land, but you’re also consuming produce at its peak nutrition,” says Kooienga. “In addition, it encourages you to get creative with the recipes and meals you’re making because you may be cooking with produce you haven’t tried before.”
Day 21: Shop your pantry for a quick dinner
Your pantry is your secret weapon when it comes to healthy cooking—think of it as home to crucial staples like rice, beans, grains, cooking oils, and spices that are the foundation for practically any meal. Scan your pantry and your perishable leftovers and challenge yourself to create a healthy meal based on everything you’ve learned so far. Everyone’s pantry is a bit different depending on their tastes and health needs, but here are some easy pantry recipes to reference (or try yourself).
Day 22: Cook a big batch meal to eat the rest of the week
It’s time to take your cooking and nutrition skills to the next level this week with meal prepping. You’re less likely to buy pre-made, packaged foods or order takeout when you essentially already have your meals in the fridge ready to go.
Your task tonight is to make a batch of something that you will then eat in some form all week long. Zeitlin says while you can certainly make a big thing of chili or soup, she generally likes to approach her meal prep by preparing two vegetables and a starch in large quantities. “That can be burnt broccoli and cauliflower, or roasted cauliflower and brussels sprouts, plus quinoa or brown rice,” she suggests. Cook and store them separately, then build your full meal for each day by adding a cooked protein (whether that’s shredded rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, roasted salmon, or marinated tempeh), some healthy fats like cheese or sliced avocado, and a sauce or dressing for flavor.
This mix-and-match philosophy is what Kooienga calls “meal components and rotations,” and she encourages all her clients to use it. “This helps reduce decision fatigue with meal prep, reduce food waste, saves you time, saves you money, and saves you energy to put towards other things in life that nourish you,” she says.
Day 23: Bring your lunch to work every day
Use the ingredients you batch-cooked to create a delicious healthy lunch for yourself every day this week, using the principles above. Don’t forget to add a sauce or spice for extra flavor!
Day 24: Cook something new with your leftovers
So you still have a ton of leftovers from your Sunday meal prep. Today, cook something easy and new using those ingredients. This doesn’t have to be exceptionally fancy; Zeitlin swears by tossing leftover vegetables in cooked chickpea pasta, or putting a new sauce on plain leftover foods to give them a different flavor profile. Or, put everything back in a hot frying pan and make a stir fry or fried rice.
Day 25: Take a night off
You’ve been cooking a lot this month—good job, you! But food is also meant to be enjoyed with others, so take the night off and go out to dinner with friends or loved ones.
“Going in with a game plan is everything when eating out,” says Zeitlin. “What tends to trip us up [from healthy eating goals] are the spontaneous choices.” She recommends reading the menu before you go if possible. Then strategize your meal accordingly. “There are four main places that people tend to overindulge at restaurants: alcohol, bread basket, starchy mains, and dessert. I like to say pick one or two, call it out to yourself before you go, and then enjoy those two things,” she says. So if you’re going to an Italian restaurant and really want pasta and a glass of wine, enjoy those two things, and save the unlimited breadsticks for another time.
Day 26: Prep your breakfast for tomorrow
Most meal-prep efforts are focused on lunches and dinners, but considering that 31 million Americans regularly skip breakfast, it’s worth trying to make the morning meal process a bit more point-and-click for the sake of your mood and energy levels. Prep tomorrow’s breakfast tonight by cooking a batch of hard-boiled eggs and storing them in the refrigerator, preparing overnight oats in a mason jar or reusable container, or even just buying a larger 32-ounce container of plain yogurt and portioning it into half-cup servings, suggests Zeitlin. “Top it off with your favorite fruit in the morning,” she says, along with any nuts, seeds, or spices you like.
Some other make-ahead breakfast options:
Day 27: Make a healthy version of your favorite recipe
Test the new skills that you’ve mastered this month and make a “healthy” version of your favorite recipe, whether that’s adding more vegetables to your go-to mac and cheese or making your mom’s beef chili recipe totally plant-based. Feeling a bit stumped? Check out these healthy winter comfort food recipes for some inspiration.
Day 28: Plan next week’s menu and shopping list
Congratulations, you made it to the end of the challenge. Ready to use the tips and skills you’ve mastered for another month of healthier eating? Keep up the momentum by committing to at least three nights of cooking at home each week. We know that life is unpredictable and this isn’t always possible, but it definitely won’t happen if you don’t plan ahead for it. So spend some time today mapping out your meals and stocking up on supplies.
For inspiration and encouragement on this journey, we suggest joining the Cook With Us community on Facebook to connect with other like-minded healthy foodies.
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Curious about trying out our other Renew Year plans? You’re just 28 days from being stronger than ever—and more money-savvy, too.
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Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America has nothing to say in the end
A few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I’d seen the latest installment of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime series, Who Is America. After I said I hadn’t, he asked if I was enjoying the series, and I told him I wasn’t, at least to that point. He didn’t believe me — and his doubt only increased when I admitted I’d liked Cohen’s earlier work, especially Da Ali G Show and Borat.
I struggled to explain myself, as I always do when discussing why I don’t like Who Is America. The show feels oddly formless to me, due to some combination of Cohen’s new roster of characters seeming surprisingly toothless, too many of the show’s segments largely running out of gas, and the fact that the various politicos Cohen and his producers managed to book always feel a little like mini bosses, the monsters you fight right before you’re told the princess is in another castle.
My friend even granted me these points. But, he said, he’d really been enjoying it, before mentioning his latest favorite segment, in which Cohen tricked some yahoos into staging a fake quinceañera meant to “trap” undocumented immigrants. (They ended up being questioned by the cops, for reasons far too complicated to get into here.) He laughed and shook his head. “Sometimes it’s just nice to see these guys take one on the chin, you know?”
In that sense, my friend wasn’t wrong. If you lean left in 2018, the world can feel a little like falling endlessly into a pit, with every bottom you hit proving false. What once felt like inviolable rules of political gravity no longer seem to apply; even using the power of shame to force politicians you disagree with into doing the right thing is often unreliable.
This, I suppose, is Cohen’s secret power. He identifies the few things his targets still might feel theoretical shame over, then zeroes in on them relentlessly.
That shame might stem, largely, from the fear of appearing as anything other than a red-blooded American white guy, but Cohen is really good at puncturing his targets’ self-image; in all the best Who Is America segments, you can watch their eyes slowly fill with regret as the segments go on. Yes, Cohen has a few targets on the left, but he tends to save his biggest guns for those on the right. And after years of the right-leaning folks he targets behaving with absolute impunity, here’s a comedian who’s at least made them look ridiculous. That’s powerful, absolutely.
And yet Who Is America so rarely lives up to its best self, to the degree that the last couple of episodes have felt composed of odds and ends, rather than particularly incisive or even funny comedic bits. The show, just seven episodes long, ran out of gas somewhere in episode four. Why?
Who Is America fundamentally lacks a point of view
Comedy, when it’s funny, can get away with a lot. It can get away with having an incoherent or confused message, with having little in the way of story or character, and sometimes even with being blatantly offensive. If you laugh at the jokes, a comedy has you, even if you leave the experience a bit embarrassed or even angry that you laughed. It’s not rational. It’s physiological.
But I do think all successful comedy has one thing in common: a point of view. By this, I simply mean that successful comedy is filtered through some specific perspective. This is usually the perspective of the comic, or the writer, or the director, but one needs only to think about the oeuvre of Adam Sandler to realize the idea of “point of view” is flexible; the key is that it’s being consistently applied across an individual work. Having that filter in place not only helps the audience look at things in some new way, it also helps them understand why something is funny. Remove the filter and a joke just becomes an observation.
This is where Who Is America falls apart, week after week. Where Da Ali G Show focused on television’s unique ability to enable our worst impulses and Borat was about the underlying horrors of American hospitality, Who Is America sometimes feels like a scattershot riff on reality television that Cohen half-sketched out in 2005 and then forgot about until a few months ago.
I think this is why some of the series’ most successful gags come from the segments’ packaging, rather than the segments themselves. When Cohen’s Alex Jones analog, a character named Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD, is introduced by a graphic that changes “LIEBRARY” to “TRUTHBRARY,” you instantly get a sense of who this guy is and how Cohen feels about him (if only because he misspells “library”). But the segments featuring Billy Wayne rarely move beyond that basic gag. Billy Wayne is an idiot who doesn’t know anything, and who tries to engage with left-leaning political luminaries and members of the media on his own ridiculous terms.
The result is that it becomes hard to tell whether the joke is meant to be on Billy Wayne — who really does endorse these ridiculous ideas — or on the various suckers Cohen managed to get on the show, who have to listen to him blather. I suspect the answer is the former, given the way Billy Wayne is introduced, but all we have to go on are a bunch of one-joke segments that go on too long, as when Billy Wayne tries to tell Jill Stein that the temperature always fluctuates by pointing out the existence of seasons.
This one-joke limitation exists for most of Cohen’s Who Is America characters. There are six of them in all, and I don’t think I laughed extensively at any of them except one — the NPR shirt-wearing Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, whom I’ll talk about in a second. Meanwhile, another character, Israeli anti-terrorism expert Erran Morad, convinced enough of Cohen’s targets to do something ridiculous to mark him as another relatively successful character. But the pickings were slim.
The weakness of Cohen’s characters might have been negated by a steady stream of high-profile guests, a sort of “Can you believe that happened?!” who’s who. But the show’s general aesthetic of seeming to have stepped out of 2005 and making only a few minor changes extends even to its treatment of its most familiar targets. It seemed like the show wasn’t even sure why it had Howard Dean talk to Billy Wayne, other than that viewers would recognize the name Howard Dean.
Once again, the packaging steps in to sell many of the gags. The various fake “shows” that Cohen has dreamed up for his characters to “star” in really are a lot of fun in conception. Perhaps a stronger version of the series would have had each episode focus on a single character, following them on their journeys through the racist, gun-loving heart of America. Yet even when Cohen really does seem like he’s zeroing in on racism or gun obsession in an intriguing way, Who Is America too often lets him down by simple virtue of its structure. It can never say anything real because Cohen is always trying to fool his marks.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for a program with a sharper point of view or stronger comedic characters. But I spent far too long in any given episode of Who Is America watching segments that simply went on forever, looking for something to say, then just sort of stopped, before moving on to the next bit.
Which brings me to the one character I felt Cohen used to make some sort of point about America today. As the hippie-out-of-time Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, Cohen finds a way to make fun of neoliberal anxiety about the state of 2018 America in ways that manage to place the joke both on Cohen’s character and the (mostly) Republicans he interviews.
The joke here has a point of view — about Cain-N’Degeocello’s wish to be as open and tolerant as possible and his anxieties about how to possibly do that. It also offers some incisive commentary about performative misery in lefty white guys. It’s satire of the modern left, sure, but a satire that knows both its target and what it wants to say about that target.
Ultimately, this type of humor accounts for far too little of a show that never quite knows what it is or what it wants to be. When I first reviewed Who Is America, the show made me angry, but after watching almost all of the series (with only the finale unseen), I’m much more dispirited by it. It doesn’t really work, but maybe its goal isn’t to work. I’m not sure it wants to do anything beyond make sure the other guy takes one on the chin.
Who Is America airs Sundays at 10 pm Eastern on Showtime.
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