As Donald Trump<\/a> handed a bag of food to people at a McDonald\u2019s drive-through window, the former president remarked on how \u201cbeautiful\u201d he found the family in the car. \u201cIt\u2019s like the perfect-looking person,\u201d the Republican said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was almost as if the people ordering the food had been carefully chosen to appear in some kind of clumsy political play \u2014 because that\u2019s precisely what happened.<\/p>\n

Much of the public probably saw some images of Trump briefly \u201c working<\/a>\u201d at a McDonald\u2019s in Pennsylvania, but that\u2019s not quite what happened. NBC News reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
The franchise in Feasterville was closed for normal business during Sunday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n
By some accounts<\/a>, the photo op was so fake that the customers never actually ordered any food: Those who participated simply “received whatever Trump gave them.”<\/p>\n
In recent months, Trump has been fixated to an unhealthy degree<\/a> with Vice President Kamala Harris having worked at a McDonald\u2019s while she was a student many years ago. The Republican apparently convinced himself<\/a> that Harris lied about this \u2014 it\u2019s never been altogether clear how he arrived at this belief \u2014 and he\u2019s raged about it<\/a> on a nearly daily basis ever since.<\/p>\n
Nearly a month ago, the GOP candidate said he planned to go to<\/a> a McDonald\u2019s \u201cin two weeks\u201d and he\u2019d \u201cwork the french fries.\u201d Trump concluded, \u201cI will have worked longer and harder at McDonald\u2019s than she did if I do that even for half an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwork,\u201d however, have been overly generous: There\u2019s an important difference between work and theatrics, and this was definitely the latter.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s claim. (A friend of Harris\u2019 told The New York Times that she recalled her working there<\/a>.)<\/p>\n
There was, however, a fleeting moment of policy relevance in this little production. The Washington Post reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\n
\n
Trump, a real-estate-billionaire-turned-politician, also did not answer a question about whether he supported raising the minimum wage. \u201cWell, I think this. These people work hard,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThey\u2019re great. And I just saw something \u2014 a process that\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n
That wasn\u2019t a \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
<\/picture><\/a><\/div>\n
Steve Benen<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of\u00a0MaddowBlog\u00a0and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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As Donald Trump handed a bag of food to people at a McDonald\u2019s drive-through window, the former president remarked on how \u201cbeautiful\u201d he found the family in the car. \u201cIt\u2019s like the perfect-looking person,\u201d the Republican said. It was almost as if the people ordering the food had been carefully chosen to appear in some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}