Donald Trump Doubts Hillary Clinton’s Hot Sauce Love, Despite Trail of Evidence

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of pandering in New York with her comment on Monday that she carries hot sauce with her everywhere she goes.

“It’s the same thing that she always does. She carries hot sauce like I carry hot sauce. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s just so phony and so pandering and so terrible,” Trump said during a Fox News interview on Tuesday morning.

Trump’s doubts echoed the hosts of The Breakfast Club radio show where she made the admission Monday.

“Now listen, I want you to know that people are going to see this and say ‘She’s pandering to black people,'” host Charlamagne Tha God told her.

But the paper trail for Clinton’s love of hot sauce is long and eclectic. She said the same thing in a 2008 interview with 60 Minutes and a January interview with NPR, explaining that the practice began in 1992 while her husband was running for president, when she read about the beneficial effects of hot peppers on the immune system.

“I thought, ‘well, that’s interesting,’ because — you know, campaigning is pretty demanding, and so I started — I’d always liked hot food — Mexican, Indian, Thai. But I started adding hot peppers, and then I got into eating them raw, wherever they weren’t really, really too hot,” she said. “I used to carry — you know, a little tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce to spice up the foods.”

At the White House in the 1990s, Clinton also kept a collection of more than 100 hot sauces, according to a December report by the Associated Press. And she told a Washington Post reporter in a 1995 lunch interview that hot sauce is her “secret passion.”

In a 2012 interview with Conde Nast Traveler, she said she always packed red pepper flakes and a mini bottle of Tabasco sauce when she traveled as Secretary of State. The Tabasco Cookbook, published in February, bragged about her habit of traveling with it.

Her longstanding affection for the sauce has also been detailed in biographies. “As an adult, she liked jalapeños in her scrambled eggs and traveled with a bottle of Tabasco sauce in her purse,” Karen Blumenthal wrote in Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History, which was published in January.

“Aides revealed that she liked spicy foods and hot sauce, and was even known to carry around a little bottle of Tabasco sauce on her person,” Michael Tomasky wrote in Hillary’s Turn, published in 2001.