Trump eats Democrats’ lunch at McDonald’s

The well-executed weekend photo-op had his supporters saying “I’m lovin’ it,” while Trump critics responded as if the ice cream machine was once again out of order.

But the reactions didn’t break down purely along partisan lines or personal feelings about Trump. “Some in the press called Trump’s McDonald’s photo-op bizarre. This is how you lose credibility,” Cenk Uygur of the progressive Young Turks wrote on the social media platform X. “That was a home run photo-op. He looked like a real person there, connecting with the average American. If you can’t see that, you’re totally blind.”

GOP operatives were generally jubilant.

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“The Trump campaign is absolutely cookin right now. Really impressive events, message, etc.,” posted Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist with ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

“There could not be a more striking contrast in these photos between who’s focused on the elites and who’s focused on the people,” wrote Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, posting a split screen of Trump at McDonald’s and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning with Liz Cheney. 

Trump attracted an adoring crowd to cheer him and be served their favorite menu items by the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. He engaged comfortably with the restaurant workers, many of them young. The pictures of Trump donning an apron and working the fry station went viral.

These interactions, like Trump’s friendly sitdowns with niche podcasters, have helped humanize him. That may be why after nearly a decade of hostile media coverage, Trump is by some measures more popular than he has ever been as a still-polarizing national political figure. 

The McDonald’s gambit came as Harris and her allies have stepped up attacks on the 78-year-old former president’s age, fitness for office, and willingness to appear in the media.

All of these charges previously dogged President Joe Biden before Harris replaced him at the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Harris has also faced questions about her own openness to the press and what she knew about Biden’s condition prior to the June 27 presidential debate that upended the race.

Yet it is difficult to make charges of hiding from the media stick when voters see Trump on television all the time, as they did this weekend and for much of the past nine years.

Harris herself skipped the Al Smith Dinner in New York City last week, instead sending in a video in which former Saturday Night Live cast member Molly Shannon did a lot of the talking for her. As the presidential race enters its final days, it is clear both candidates are favoring venues that will cast them in the most favorable light.

As the Trump McDonald’s maneuver entered its second day in the news, CBS announced it would not release the transcript of Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, which reportedly ran twice as long as what was broadcast.

The genesis of Trump’s turn under the Golden Arches was an attempt to troll Harris, who has said she worked at McDonald’s in her youth. “I did fries,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. “And then I did the cashier.” That bit of the vice president’s job history came under scrutiny when the Washington Free Beacon reported her frying days were not listed on a 1987 job application or the accompanying résumé and did not become a staple of her biography until her 2019 presidential campaign.

A New York Times story on the controversy began, “Birtherism, meet burgerism.” Despite the comparison to conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the outlet acknowledged, “The first time Ms. Harris appears to have prominently brought up her summer job was during her first presidential campaign in 2019, as she joined striking McDonald’s workers on a Las Vegas picket line calling for a $15 minimum wage.”

“In subsequent years, 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,” the New York Times reported. “She also did not mention the job in her memoir, although she talked extensively about her time at Howard and the various jobs mentioned on that old résumé.”

Whether Harris’s McDonald’s days are a lost footnote to history or a case of Hamburgled valor, Trump’s publicity stunt got under Democrats’ skin, which in turn led them to amplify it.

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Trump’s detractors pointed out that the visitors to the McDonald’s hosting him were screened by the Secret Service, a security precaution necessitated by two attempts on the former president’s life this year. They maintained that Trump had turned McDonald’s into the home of his whoppers, that it was all a Kroc.

But the risk is that political opponents raining on Trump’s PlayPlace will appear humorless and pedantic. Trump’s new alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement aside, he continues to feed the electorate a steady diet of these stories.