The official White House Twitter account posted a photo of the food spread that evening and picked up more than 6,000 retweets and 21,000 likes inside a day5. Journalist Hunter Walker (@hunterw) then shared a video from inside the event showing Trump gesturing at the piles of burgers; the clip pulled in more than 18,000 retweets, 63,000 likes and 5 million views in under 24 hours4.

The following morning, Trump tweeted about the dinner and misspelled 'hamburgers' as 'hamberders,' writing that he had served 'massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamberders etc.' The tweet was quickly deleted, but screenshots were already circulating, and the typo became the naming hook for the whole event3.

Reporters picked apart the numbers. The Washington Post physically counted the buffet and came up with roughly 319 sandwiches worth about $2,400, well short of Trump's claim of 1,0005. Vox tracked the count jumping from 300 to 1,000 in a matter of minutes on the same night2. Comedians piled on across Twitter, with @robrousseau joking about a fictional NBC show called 'PRESIDENT BIG BOY' and comedian W. Kamau Bell imagining a staffer sobbing about using 'Lincoln gravy boats' to hold McNugget sauce5.