“Leaking” no longer seems an apt term for what’s coming from the Trump Administration—we will soon require aqueducts to manage these flows—but certain new bits of information can still make a weird splash. The release, last week, of a recorded conversation that Michael Cohen had with Donald Trump, who was then running for President, was notable not only for its discussion of an apparent scheme to acquire the rights to a story about an alleged affair. There was, listeners noted, a desperate drink order in the middle. “Get me a Coke, please!” Trump, a notorious consumer of diet soda, cried as the going became devious.
How the mighty have fallen! And by the mighty, of course, I mean Diet Coke. Recall the soda’s heady ascent in the nineties, in the famous “Diet Coke Break” ad: permed women ogled a construction worker who compulsively removed his shirt to sip his mid-morning refreshment, and the world swooned toward the drinks aisle. Now, it seems, Diet Coke is the elixir of soft-bodied plutocrats desperate to shed their shady pasts and, possibly, a few pounds. Trump, we’re told, guzzles Diet Coke instead of coffee. The Times reports his daily intake to be twelve cans, which, at his reported weight, is two cans shy of the the daily recommended adult human limit for caffeine. Everything seems quite precarious these days, and Diet Coke, as is its wont, has given that precariousness a late-afternoon-style crash of jangly existential panic. “Ahhh” has become “AHHH!,” and along the way the fortunes of America’s favorite power soda have gone flat.
Consider those who rose on Diet Coke’s wings. Besides Trump, one of the most notorious Diet Coke mainliners of recent decades was Harvey Weinstein. Bill Clinton was a known fan (a Diet Coke can is buried in a time capsule at his Presidential library), as were members of his Cabinet (such as Larry Summers). Today, the drink is struggling: its sales have declined yearly since 2006. There is no mystery why. During the late eighties and nineties, Diet Coke seemed less fussy, less patrician, less “Frasier” than second-wave coffee. It helped define a novel archetype of masculinity—the bootstraps kid who’d made it big, who was cool and modern, in a suit—that would later be perverted to support crimes of the sort now finally being recognized. As an office drink and a leisure drink, a daylight beverage and an acceptable cocktail order, Diet Coke was suited to porous work-life boundaries and the leaders who learned to thrive in, and in some cases insidiously exploit, the gray areas of that new world.
To an astonishing extent, the age of Diet Coke—its rise, its reign, its fall—maps onto a historical bracket that began with the launch of MTV and ended with the emergence of social media: the era of the power of the image in a mainstream burnished form. The soda hit the stores for the first time in 1982. The Coca-Cola Company seems previously to have thought that people didn’t want their drink to announce that they were on a diet. But the popularity of Diet Pepsi, and the growing glamorization of fitness, obviated this concern, and Coca-Cola realized that it could market more powerfully under the Coke name than it could market its existing diet cola, Tab, which had suffered from the saccharine scares of the preceding decade.
Marketing and power became the lodestars of Diet Coke’s ambitious brand. The first commercial for the new drink showed celebrities in black tie and jewels filing up the red carpet to watch, with manic grins, Diet Coke-themed dancers kick to a racing soundtrack. (Coke culture and coke culture arrived together, hand in sequinned glove.) By then, the Coca-Cola Company had bought Columbia Pictures, a business move that, some have suggested, was most successful as a product-placement scheme. When the company sold the studio to Sony, in 1989, celebrity culture, commercial branding, and creativity were convergent, and Diet Coke had become a part of that powerful braid. In the past, Trump has tweeted, “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”; one can only assume that he was not looking far beyond the mirror during these years. A well-known Diet Coke addict has been Karl Lagerfeld, whose ascent (and slimming) dovetailed with the beverage’s rise. (“I don’t like hot drinks, very strange,” he has explained. “I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed.”) “Diet Coke became the ultimate accessible fashion accessory,” the journalist Christa D’Souza has written. “Cheaper than an It-bag, more obvious than a perfume, and available in every corner shop.”
Enter the boomer opportunists. This swirl of power, sex, and corporatized glamour attracted an emerging entrepreneurial class, which realized that great work could be done if you just left behind the niceties and red tape of the past and played—well, not dirty, certainly not, but, you know, not quite by the rules, seizing loopholes as you saw them and leveraging the way that celebrity, business, culture, creativity, and power were flowing together. The results of this world view carried to extremes have recently grown all too horrifyingly plain. A producer who bucked Hollywood trends and made ambitious, offbeat midcult films into a major market by bullying and media favor-swapping? Surely, the logic of the era said, this was fair game for anybody with the vision, acumen, and guts; other liberties, some criminal, were easy to tack on. A caffeinated soda you could drink all day, instead of coffee, without getting super fat? Our forebears would have lived this way, surely, if only beverage innovation had let them. Although the Coca-Cola Company has always tried to press Diet Coke on hip, scrappy youths, it became, enduringly, the beverage of the power generation that emerged across the Clinton years and cheered tie-less, outside-the-box, rule-bending thought in business and in life. This culture isn’t coterminous with what has recently emerged as a slippery, insulated, narrative-controlling criminal class hiding in plain sight. But it may have made that cabal possible. Diet Coke fit with everything new, and seemingly cost-free, about the nineties.
If our reckoning with the abuses of that era has been gradual, long, and increasingly painful, so has the declining profile of Diet Coke. In 2013, domestic Diet Coke sales hit their lowest figures since 1995, before the Shirtless Diet Coke Man was iconic. The drink lost 4.2 per cent in sales volume in 2016 alone. In recent years, consumers have grown more scrutinous of supposedly healthy fare, and beautiful people are more likely to seek stimulation in nut-milk lattes, matcha, fresh juice, or a number of extremely fancy waters.
So Diet Coke is struggling back—with a carbonated kick. During its years of decline, new products kept appearing, like lost siblings in pursuit of an inheritance. What were we to make of Coke Zero, the twin with the creepy, vacant gaze? Who conceived Diet Coke Plus, the grifter soda that purported to be rich with vitamins and minerals? Earlier this year, the Coca-Cola Company introduced a suite of four supposedly hip new flavors (Ginger Lime, Feisty Cherry, Zesty Blood Orange, Twisted Mango). Let’s speak frankly: these are crazed and desperate drinks. Who buys blood oranges for the zest? Recently, in the daze of the summer heat, I bought a case of Diet Coke Ginger Lime, and it tasted like Diet Coke drunk from a glass unrinsed of citrus Dawn. New Diet Coke arrives in slender cans that look like plus-size Red Bull servings—Red Bull being one of a few beverages that is even more of a red flag for decency than Diet Coke.
Preliminary reports suggest that this novelty packaging has raised sales numbers. But the final picture is more complicated—with a tart, ironic fizz. Beverage-biz mythology holds that Coke does better under Democratic Administrations than under Republican ones. Recent news gives unexpected credence to that claim. Last week, James Quincey, Coke’s president and C.E.O., told investors that the company will have to raise its soda prices, in an effort to rebalance the books. The reason? Largely Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, apparently, which have driven up costs for aluminum and steel. This is, it seems, the rare instance in which the Commander-in-Chief has not managed to privilege his personal interests. Drink up, Mr. President. A reckoning awaits.
Sourse: newyorker.com
