Answering four questions about Donald Trump’s fear of deadly fruit

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Former president Donald Trump has been known at times to exaggerate. With Trump hidden from the public eye more now than in the past, you had perhaps forgotten this fact, but it’s true. Trump will say things that strain credulity, both as a matter of fact and scale.

If you had forgotten this, we just got a good reminder. Last year, Trump was deposed in a legal dispute over his security team’s response to a protest at Trump Tower in 2015. During that deposition, a transcript of which was published this week, Trump made a striking claim about the sorts of risks he faced as a public figure.

Like deadly flying bananas.

In an apparent effort to show that Trump embraced the use of force against perceived threats, he was asked about comments he made at a rally in early 2016 where he encouraged attendees to “knock the crap” out of anyone who might be getting ready to throw a tomato.

“A tomato, a pineapple, a lot of other things they throw,” Trump responded. “Yeah, if the security saw that, I would say you have to – and it’s not just me, it’s other people in the audience get badly hurt. Yeah, I think that they have to be aggressive in stopping that from happening. Because if that happens, you can be killed if that happens. ”

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The lawyers questioning him pressed the point. Even using physical force?

“To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that?” Trump said. “Yeah. It’s dangerous stuff. ”

So I have some questions. Let’s start at the beginning.

Why is throwing fruit in protest a thing?

You’re probably familiar with the idea that performers were once pelted with rotten fruit by disapproving audiences. At the very least, you’re probably familiar with the website Rotten Tomatoes, which uses that concept as a metric for evaluating the quality of movies. But where did this originate?

A few years ago, the magazine Bon Appétit (fittingly enough) looked at this question. It identified the first example of a public figure being pelted with food as having occurred in AD 63, when a Roman politician was subjected to a barrage of turnips. Over time, eggs became the food of choice for a few obvious reasons: portability, messiness and the visceral satisfaction of the egg cracking against the target. Eggs remain a favorite to this day.

Not that tomatoes didn’t also make an appearance. Bon Appétit also dug up this New York Times article from 1883.

Demoralizing, definitely. But deadly? That’s more dubious.

Why is Trump worried about being pelted?

Before we dig into the mortality rates of airborne fruit, it’s useful to consider Trump’s own history with protesters.

During the 2016 campaign, there were repeated incidents in which hecklers appeared at his rallies, though no occasions on which anyone threw anything edible. There was the time that a guy in Dayton, Ohio, rushed the stage as Trump spoke, an incident that Trump tried to link to Islamic State terrorism. And shortly before the election, Trump was rushed away from the lectern at a Nevada rally when someone mistakenly announced that an audience member had a gun.

But Trump’s fear of things being thrown at him was demonstrated robustly elsewhere. There was that Iowa rally with Trump’s tomato warning, something that he insisted in his deposition had been a function of “a threat” he’d been informed of, potentially by the Secret Service.

“You get hit with fruit,” he said, “it’s – no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that. ”

Bear in mind, this is the same president who warned about how his perceived opponents used other edible projectiles as weapons. As protests unfolded across the country in the summer of 2020, for example, Trump warned of an unexpected threat to police officers.

“They have cans of soup. Soup. And they throw the cans of soup, ”Trump said. “That’s better than a brick because you can’t throw a brick; it’s too heavy. But a can of soup, you can really put some power into that, right? Then, when they get caught, they say, ‘No, this is soup for my family.’ They’re so innocent. ‘This is soup for my family.’ It’s incredible. ”

He then warned that anarchists also liked to throw “big bags of soup” at police officers.

As the lawyers at the deposition were hinting, Trump’s rhetoric on the point does seem largely to be about justifying a response. At another point in his presidency, Trump suggested that federal agents at the border might be justified in responding to anyone throwing rocks with deadly force.

“We will consider that a firearm,” he said, “because there’s not much difference where you get hit in the face with a rock.”

A rock or a can of soup might, in fact, pose a credible risk of death to a target – to whatever extent those threats actually existed. But then we come back to Trump’s actual assertion here.

Can a thrown banana be deadly?

If you have never encountered a banana, allow me to quickly describe one. It is an elongated yellow fruit that is firm to the touch for the first few days after being picked from a banana plant and then, at some point, instantaneously turns into a package of mush. Even when firm, that solidity is unstable; one can hasten the mushening process by simply dropping a firm banana on a table.

In other words, a ripe banana would seem to pose no actual threat to a person’s physical health.

But you need not take my word for it. For some reason, someone at Reddit asked this exact question – “How fast does a banana have to go to be lethal?” – in 2019. Other users offered convincing answers, centered on the speed necessary to fracture someone’s skull. (We are setting aside the possibility that someone could be giving a speech, have a banana thrown at them, have the banana enter their open mouth and become lodged in their throat, then choking them to death.)

It includes assessments like this from user aberroco:

“Impact force is F = (0.5 * m * v^2) ÷ d, where m is mass, v is velocity and d is impact distance (ie distance from start of an impact to end of it), for a banana that ‘ ll be the length of a banana in some dimension. So, assume it’s flying along it’s [sic] longest side (so force will be obviously lower and speed will need to be higher). ”

In short, aberroco figures that you would have to throw it at a speed between 44 and 124 mph. Or, rather, that it would have to be traveling at that speed upon arrival at its destination. I’m just going to chalk this one up to “it’s unlikely.”

But bananas are light and mushy. What about something more robust? That raises another question.

Can you smuggle a pineapple into a secure venue?

For this, I turned to an expert. Mike White is the director of the eastern region for Security Detection Solutions, and he was kind enough to respond to my question. The answer seemed as though it would be obvious to me – but it wasn’t.

“It depends on what the venue is and what they’re doing for security,” White said of the idea. “If they’re just doing a metal detector and not doing bags, then, yes” – one could smuggle in a pineapple. And even if you were checking bags at the entrance, security agents aren’t allowed to put their hands in those bags (which is why they ask you to move things around). Cover a pineapple with something like a shirt, and security won’t see it. (This is why venues are moving to allowing only clear bags, White said.)

“Technically,” he summarized, “it’s a legitimate concern.”

Of course, that’s in part because no security officer who is checking bags is going to worry about a big piece of fruit in the first place.

“We’re in the weapons-detection business, not the fruit-scanning business,” White said succinctly.

But that’s the key lesson of all of this, isn’t it? From now on, security officials looking to avert hilarious tragedies had darned well better start being in the fruit-scanning business.

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