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:

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:

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.”