Politics

The difference between work and Trump’s staged McDonald’s theatrics

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

The difference between work and Trump’s staged McDonald’s theatrics

As Donald Trump handed a bag of food to people at a McDonald’s drive-through window, the former president remarked on how “beautiful” he found the family in the car. “It’s like the perfect-looking person,” the Republican said.

It was almost as if the people ordering the food had been carefully chosen to appear in some kind of clumsy political play — because that’s precisely what happened.

Much of the public probably saw some images of Trump briefly “working” at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, but that’s not quite what happened. NBC News reported:

The franchise in Feasterville was closed for normal business during Sunday’s photo op. The customers who went through the drive thru were pre-selected by the franchise and the local Trump campaign team, according to a person familiar with the event. The cars were also screened and searched, and the people in them were wanded down, according to the source.

By some accounts, the photo op was so fake that the customers never actually ordered any food: Those who participated simply “received whatever Trump gave them.”

In recent months, Trump has been fixated to an unhealthy degree with Vice President Kamala Harris having worked at a McDonald’s while she was a student many years ago. The Republican apparently convinced himself that Harris lied about this — it’s never been altogether clear how he arrived at this belief — and he’s raged about it on a nearly daily basis ever since.

Nearly a month ago, the GOP candidate said he planned to go to a McDonald’s “in two weeks” and he’d “work the french fries.” Trump concluded, “I will have worked longer and harder at McDonald’s than she did if I do that even for half an hour.”

It took a little longer than two weeks, but he followed through and played his part in this staged campaign event. Those characterizing this as “work,” however, have been overly generous: There’s an important difference between work and theatrics, and this was definitely the latter.

Just as notably, this was a trolling exercise, rooted in the idea that Trump caught Harris in a lie, despite the fact that neither the former president nor any of his allies have presented a shred of evidence discrediting the vice president’s claim. (A friend of Harris’ told The New York Times that she recalled her working there.)

There was, however, a fleeting moment of policy relevance in this little production. The Washington Post reported:

Trump, a real-estate-billionaire-turned-politician, also did not answer a question about whether he supported raising the minimum wage. “Well, I think this. These people work hard,” Trump said. “They’re great. And I just saw something — a process that’s beautiful.”

That wasn’t a “yes.”

Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”