Trump Donor's Positive Diarrhea Lettuce Test Vanishes After White House Sit-Down

The FDA's only positive test in America's worst parasite outbreak in years survived exactly one day — and what happened at the White House 72 hours earlier is why nobody's buying the walk-back.

The FDA apologized this weekend. Not to the roughly 7,000 Americans confirmed or suspected to be battling weeks of what health officials politely call “watery, sometimes explosive” diarrhea.

To the lettuce company.

That company is Taylor Farms, the produce giant whose shredded iceberg sits at the center of the largest parasite outbreak in years. Last Thursday evening, with the outbreak raging, Taylor Farms executives met with the White House and the FDA to distance the company from the outbreak and air complaints about the government’s investigation — a sit-down first reported by The New York Times.

Three days later, the government’s only hard evidence against the company evaporated.

Late Sunday, the agency announced that its one and only positive test in the nationwide cyclospora outbreak — a sample of Taylor Farms shredded iceberg that had tested positive just 24 hours earlier — was a false positive. Lab experts “re-reviewed” the result, the agency said, and it doesn’t count. Taylor Farms went further: the FDA “made a mistake... FDA has not identified a single positive product test result.” The company says the agency apologized to it directly.

The Saturday notice announcing the positive test has since been scrubbed from the FDA’s outbreak updates.

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And then there’s the money. FEC filings show Taylor Fresh Foods, the company’s parent, wrote a $1 million check to MAGA Inc., the super PAC bankrolling Trump’s political operation, in March 2025 — less than a week after the FDA announced it would shelve the Food Traceability Rule, the biggest food-safety reform in a decade, designed specifically to trace contaminated produce through the supply chain during an outbreak exactly like this one. The rule now sits on ice until July 2028.

To be clear: no one has produced evidence that the donation or the meeting caused the reversal. But the timeline — outbreak, White House access, positive test, apology — is doing plenty of talking on its own. “Like most people, I assume FDA is lying here” to protect a Trump donor, went one reaction in a weekend pile-on that Raw Story rounded up under the word “horrifying.”

Meanwhile, the outbreak itself hasn’t gone anywhere. The CDC has lab-confirmed 1,645 infections tied to shredded iceberg served at Taco Bell across five states, is investigating 5,100 more, and Michigan alone counts over 5,000 cases and 102 hospitalizations. Taylor Farms recalled iceberg shipped to 27 states between June 29 and July 16 — while blaming a single unnamed “independent farm” in central Mexico and declining to publish a list of which restaurants and grocers got the product. The FDA admits it can’t make them.

This is also the same supplier whose recalled onions were linked to the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder E. coli outbreak in October 2024 — and whose Mexican salad mix was fingered in a cyclospora outbreak all the way back in 2013.

FDA inspectors are now headed to the company’s Guanajuato plant. Until they find something, the official source of the largest parasite outbreak in years is, once again: nobody.