Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has earned credit for a number of accomplishments.
Yet his latest touted victory may rank among the strangest of them all — especially given that he had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The White House seemed eager to tack another win onto Trump’s growing tally of achievements.
There was just one snag: the people actually responsible had already explained how it happened, and their version of events left the president completely out of the picture. Wendy’s announced that its iconic yellow packaging it used for decades is coming back across the board, and the internet spent two days getting emotional about the nostalgia bait.
Trump had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t posted about Wendy’s, hadn’t pressured anyone about Wendy’s, and is, by his own long record, a McDonald’s fan. The company had already said whose idea it was, and it wasn’t Trump’s.
None of that stopped an official U.S. government account from replying to the news on Sept. 17 with five words and five exclamation points
The packaging news itself was simple enough. Wendy’s said burgers, nuggets, fries and Frostys will start arriving in throwback yellow on Sept. 28, with the retro look sticking around into 2027.
Yellow was the brand’s default from the day Dave Thomas opened the first restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969, before the chain drifted toward the red-and-white scheme most customers know today.
‘He’s a Dictator’: Trump Boasts About Having the Power to Do Anything He Wants — Then Signs Executive Order He Admittedly Knows Nothing About
The company was also explicit about who deserved the credit … and it wasn’t a politician. “Fans asked. Constantly,” chief marketing and customer growth officer Tariq Hassan told USA Today, calling it one of the most requested comebacks in company history.
A spokesperson added that yellow “has been part of Wendy’s since the very beginning and is something many fans instantly recognize.”
So when the pop culture account Pop Crave shared the news on Sept. 17 alongside a photo of a burger, fries and a drink in the old yellow design, most of the replies were people arguing about whether the food tasted better back then.
One reply was not.
“Thank you, President Trump!!!!!” the official White House account wrote, offering no explanation of what the president had to do with a private company’s marketing decision.
The post has since pulled in roughly 3 million views and picked up a Community Note, according to MeidasTouch News, informing readers that Trump did not bring the packaging back and that Wendy’s attributed the move to customer demand.
Asked by The Independent what the post actually meant, the White House responded with three words: “America is back!”
The replies underneath were less enthusiastic.
“You’re the classmate that takes credit for the whole project while doing nothing,” one user wrote.
Another went straight at the wording of the original announcement: “It said ‘by popular demand’ and from what I’ve gathered, Trump isn’t popular. I’m just going by polls!”
Some aimed at whoever is running the account. “This will definitely secure the midterms,” one person sarcastically wrote with an eye-roll emoji. “Lol, how pathetic. I’d hate myself if I ran this account.”
Another summed up the administration’s tactic: “Anything that happens during the Trump admin that he likes he thinks he is responsible for. Everything else is Biden’s fault.”
One reply needed only a sentence: “Btw this is what cult of personality looks like.”
Of course, this is nothing new when it comes to Trump and his administration. When Cracker Barrel scrapped its redesigned logo in August 2025 after conservative backlash, Trump bragged that his Truth Social post forced the reversal, and his aides raced to post screenshots as proof.
At least in that case, Trump had publicly weighed in first. With Wendy’s, there is no post, no phone call and no statement to point to. Only a fast-food chain saying its customers asked for a color back.
The timing isn’t incidental either. The White House has been aggressively marketing Trump’s “historic results” with the midterms approaching, and this is what the win column apparently looks like now.
Commenters kept returning to that gap, noting that groceries, rent and gas have not gotten cheaper, and that even fast food stopped being cheap a while ago.
The nostalgia play also arrives while Wendy’s works through a bumpy turnaround, with the company shuttering underperforming U.S. locations as it tries to win back customers.
The yellow returns Sept. 28. Trump had nothing to do with it, and the government’s official account thanked him anyway.
It was the second time in about a week that a Trump-run account had publicly thanked him for something he had nothing to do with. The last one involved hurricanes.
