If he goes to lockup, even briefly...he will be in GenPop. It will harm a lot of other inmates that don't deserve the same fate, but when you know where a prison gets its food supply from...it's that hard to tamper with it. Yeah, we've all seen movies where they shank one another or whatever. And that's not entertainment. But when you know what and when somebody is going to eat or drink something, it gets real easy...real fucking quick. Now trouble is you may have otherwise harmless prisoners eat/drink before him and start to show signs of illness and so Steve gets wise and doesn't eat. But it ain't all prison yard brawls and carved-up toothbrush stabbings.
Now the problem, aside from taking out people who don't deserve it, is if it doesn't work the first time---they lock down and install new food distributor safety procedures. So you really only get 1 or 2 cracks at it. It's harder to do with a guy like Trump who moves all around the country, not just Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower and Burger King. The easy parts are knowing when and where exactly someone will be eating, not that hard to ascertain when they're in lockup. Then getting to the facility food distributer, harder but not impossible. Then trying to minimize fallout to other inmates so the target doesn't suddenly lose his appetite. It's a delicate balance but it's been done hundreds of times before.
csb/ I've told this story before. Most former Presidents still have plain-clothed SS agents go to random grocery stores to buy groceries for the former first families. You can't taint the entire supply chain for every single grocer and takeout joint in a whole metroplex. But when somebody eats 80% of their meals from the same kitchen at the same resort which also caters private events, all using the same delivery invoice. Getting to that warehouse isn't that difficult. The cartons are checked upon departure from the warehouses and again at arrival and again in the kitchen. But Sysco and Eurostar don't grow/slaughter that shit themselves in an industrial park . They just aggregate it, process it, package it, and deliver it.
Nobody gets to bad men like this with a knife. When you know precisely when and where and what meal they will be having, the situation becomes much more clear. Tight as security may be around me, if you know I'm in the cell block C commissary every day for oatmeal at exactly 8:03 am because my order in the line is first for the second tub of cereal. Or you know that 4 days a week, I eat a deconstructed hamberder at 8:45pm before going to post social media rants. It's just a reverse engineering of logistics and chemistry. This isn't the Roman Empire, there are no royal food tasters anymore. Just transportation dossiers and publicly released schedules.