You’ve seen this headline here before, not even three weeks ago. “Nothing Burger: Trump Burger founder likely facing deportation,” was a big hit and rightfully so, especially given National Zero’s prior pieces deriding Fox News’s coverage of the small Houston area fascist-themed burger chain.
So why the repeat? Funny story. Like actually funny story, courtesy once again of local weekly the Fayette County Record, clarifying a somewhat complicated lineage that Fox News had neglected to explain and National Zero made only a passing mention of for brevity’s sake: Roland Beainy, the Lebanese-born partner in Trump Burger, currently facing deportation over an alleged sham marriage was not the actual founder of the chain, though Beainy presented himself as such to the Houston Chronicle back in 2022 – he also apparently just straight-up lied to them and claimed he’d been born in Boston in the 1990s before his parents returned to Lebanon with him when he was six.
When and how exactly Beainy bought into the business and whether/the extent of his ownership interest of each of the four establishments called Trump Burger isn’t really important because the fact is that the chain’s origin can be traced to a spot called the Bellville Cafe, in the town of the same name, and whose owner Iyad Muhammad Abuelhawa retitled it the “Trump Cafe” in October 2016 out of love and respect for the pro-pussy-grabbing then-novice candidate. He closed it the next year and then launched Trump Burger in 2020 and Beainy came into the picture thereafter.