The genius of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt

Looking back on previous presidential campaigns, it suddenly seems shocking that no other candidate ever thought to don an apron, stand at a drive-thru window and ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’.

All politicians pander, of course – kissing babies, eating corn dogs at state fairs, rolling up sleeves on factory floors. But nothing in American culture says ‘humble everyman’ like working the French fries station at a McDonald’s. As far as I can tell, Donald Trump has been the first candidate to do it. His 30-minute ‘shift’ at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday has since dominated the political discourse – and for good reason.

What a stroke of campaigning genius. Trump played the role to perfection, coming across as warm and friendly, and not taking himself too seriously. He lavished compliments on the customers he served. He called the employee who was showing him the ropes ‘an expert’, asked her questions about how to do the job and praised her long service at the company. When he told a customer his food was ‘on Trump’, he then turned around the woman he was working with and asked, almost meekly, ‘I’m allowed to do that, right?’.

In the past, other politicians have come unstuck when trying to pose as fans of fast food. Back in 2009, Barack Obama infamously asked for a hamburger with dijon mustard – a far fancier variety of mustard than the yellow one that’s normally paired with burgers and hot dogs. Worse, in 2016, Hillary Clinton claimed she always carries hot sauce in her bag, which was widely dismissed as a cynical attempt to pander to black voters.

‘This is fun, I could do this all day’, Trump said on Sunday to his temporary co-worker. ‘I like this job!’ And unlike most politicians, he actually sounded believable.

I say this as someone who cried when Trump won the 2016 election: I was genuinely charmed by the whole bit. It was wholesome. It was sweet. It was a lighthearted moment in an otherwise deeply unnerving political time. Let’s not forget that, just a few months ago, Trump came within millimetres of having his head blown off.

Of course, the corporate media didn’t see the McDonald’s stop the same way. Keith Olbermann, sounding more and more like a rabid North Korean propagandist every day, called it a ‘buffoonish disaster’.

Other journalists seemed to think that they had found a gotcha moment by calling this obviously pre-planned, carefully managed campaign event ‘staged’ because the restaurant was closed during his visit. What was the Trump campaign supposed to do? Just rock up to some McDonald’s and let a parade of unvetted people get within stabbing distance of him?

Of course, there was a cynical reason for the McDonald’s stunt. Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, claims to have worked at a McDonald’s to help fund her way through law school, but there are no records of this. Trump has accused Harris of lying about her experience in order to boost her credibility among working-class voters. This led the New York Times to describe Trump’s stunt as ‘birtherism, meet burgerism’, a reference to Trump’s spreading of fake news that President Obama was not born in the United States.

But there are reasons to be sceptical of Harris’s claims. Tellingly, the New York Times seems to have taken it on faith that she worked at McDonald’s, as it ‘would be a difficult task for almost anyone’ to independently verify. The article is forced to concede that ‘Ms Harris talked so little about her long-ago job at McDonald’s that even some of her friends and close aides did not know she had worked there. She also did not mention the job in her memoir, although she talked extensively about her time at Howard [law school] and the various jobs mentioned on that old résumé.’ Nevertheless, it accepts Harris’s version of events because one of her friends and her campaign team insist she worked there. A top-quality investigation. The media never seem to realise just how lame, foolish and scolding they make themselves look whenever they’re covering Trump.

When Trump enters a McDonald’s and says, ‘I like this job!’, he is validating the lives and the livelihoods of fast-food workers everywhere – people whose work is portrayed either as a tragic life failure or is treated as the butt of tired, classist jokes by mainstream media and culture. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Harris campaign deployed the singer Lizzo. She posted a video of herself sashaying on to a private jet, yelling, ‘You hos couldn’t even spell democracy!’. In just two short weeks, we will see which message resonates more with the American people.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.