Amazing everyone, and not in a good way, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro has been Instagrammed pigging out on a big prime steak dinner by a Turkish celebrity chef famous for serving $275 meat plates at the Miami version of his restaurant empire.  Maduro was Instagrammed dining from Istanbul.

This makes quite an impression, as he bears responsibility for a nation where the locals are forced to dine on spoiled meat, zoo animals, rats, and family pets, if they can get anything at all, and who otherwise fight with machetes over garbage scraps to avoid starvation.  Millions have fled from hunger alone.  Thirty percent of Venezuela's population makes do on one meal a day, and the average weight loss for every Venezuelan in Maduro's socialist hellhole is now 24 pounds per person, up from last year's 19.  There are people in the country who look like this, which I can't even joke about.

Incredibly, it's not the first time Maduro’s done it.

Venezuela's president, already mocked for gaining weight amid a hunger crisis, pulls out an empanada from his desk during a live TV address. pic.twitter.com/sPw63dbt83

— Hannah Dreier (@hannahdreier) November 3, 2017

Maduro does have a reputation for pig-stupidity, and the fact that the Instagrammed video was taken down by the chef, Nusret Gökçe, known as Salt Bae, who happens to have a record as an odious leftist defender of dictators, suggests recognition of a mistake made.

But the fact that it's happened before, as the second video shows, with Maduro reaching into his presidential desk on live television to take a chomp off an empanada he kept there, suggests that maybe more is going on.

As I noted here in my earlier AT piece about that:

Maduro, a former bus driver, is colossally stupid and may have been doing just what came naturally to his uncouth self in taking the bite out of the empanada, having no sense of propriety or sense of the office he holds.  But the message sent to Venezuelans is clear enough: the elites eat.  The poor don't.

It's starting to look less like stupidity now and more as though he's flaunting it.  Ask Marie Antoinette or the Ceaușescus how well that worked out.