It’s not masculine to be seen licking ice cream in public, Fox News star Jesse Watters declared on Tuesday night in a bizarre rant that also linked eating the frozen treat to dementia.
It didn’t take long for photos to surface of Watters, grinning like a schoolboy, enjoying an ice cream cone at a Jersey Shore establishment.
During Tuesday’s broadcast of The Five, the MAGA host joined other right-wing media trolls in claiming it was “super weird” for President Joe Biden to eat ice cream with NBC late-night host Seth Meyers on Monday. (Of course, the president speaking to reporters about the potential for a Gaza ceasefire while casually munching down on his cone sparked its own set of bipartisan mockery and outrage.)
“Do you know grown men who go get ice cream by themselves? I don’t. It’s very strange,” conservative pundit Clay Travis argued on social media.
“You know my rule about men eating soup in public? I don’t think it’s manly… not a good look,” Watters declared. “I think the same thing for ice cream. You should save that for vacation. A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.”
Taking it even further on his primetime Fox News show, Watters suggested that Biden eating ice cream with Meyers while taking questions from the press proved the 81-year-old president is in cognitive decline.
“You know who lights up for ice cream? Children and the elderly. There’s a reason caregivers deliver ice cream to their patients in nursing homes,” he asserted. “According to the Alzheimer’s Association, ice cream is a favorite for people with diminished faculties.”
After reading a passage about ice cream’s impact on patients from the association’s book, Watters said he “obviously” wasn’t diagnosing Biden with Alzheimer’s before doing exactly that.
Yet, while Watters insists that eating ice cream in public is both not “manly” and a sign that one’s mental faculties are diminishing, it wasn’t that long ago when the Fox News host was spotted enjoying a vanilla cone in public.
Iceberg Ice Cream, a seasonal store in the Jersey Shore vacation town of Lafayette, shared a pair of images on its official Facebook page of a beaming Watters alongside the shop’s owners during an August 2019 visit, grasping his waffle cone like a middle-aged man in not-mental-decline.
“I’m Watters and this is my world,” read the caption. “Shout out to Jesse Watters for stopping in tonight!”
Meanwhile, Watters’ Tuesday night comments about Biden’s love of ice cream somehow aren’t the first time he’s griped about the subject. During an October 2022 segment, for instance, Watters complained that the president enjoying a cone in public is “too casual a look” for the United States.
“A man should never lick an ice cream cone in public,” Watters said back then. “A man can only eat ice cream on vacation. I guess Biden is always on vacation, so it makes sense. But if a man needs to eat ice cream in public, he should scoop it out of a bowl with a spoon.”
