“I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s,” said Donald Trump as he exchanged his suit jacket for a yellow-strapped apron. It’s the motion every member of the McDonald’s crew across the world on kitchen shift must perform to begin work. But Trump was there as part of a shrewd political strategy: a photo-op showing him working at the fast-food chain for a day, a simple stunt that has produced some of the most bizarre yet powerful images of the entire presidential campaign.
Clearly, Trump wasn’t working a real McDonald’s shift. The store in Feasterville, Pennsylvania had been closed down for normal business so that it could be used by his campaign. The “beautiful” people he handed bags of food to were carefully pre-selected by the franchise and his campaign. The people and their cars were screened and searched – understandably given that Trump has had two close calls with wannabe-assassins in the past few months.
Speaking as someone who has worked in McDonald’s, and who was frequently dumped on fries, if only things were that perfectly choreographed. It would be fun to see Trump work a real McDonald’s shift: the impatient customers, the constant demand for speed and efficiency, the endless loading of cardboard with fried food. But, as with all campaign photo ops, it doesn’t matter what the “reality” is, only the optics and perception. And on his own terms, Trump hit a home run here, fluently broadcasting to America his unique appeal as a billionaire-populist, a plutocrat-proletarian.
Trolling Kamala Harris over her unverifiable but probably accurate claim to have worked in McDonald’s as a college student has already become a fixture of the Trump campaign. Nearly a month ago, Trump said he planned to go to a McDonald’s to “work the french fries”. Trump then declared: “I will have worked longer and harder at McDonald’s than she did if I do that even for half an hour.” He has now followed through with that promise.
It’s no coincidence that he gave this performance in Pennsylvania, not only a key electoral battleground, but a deindustrialised state whose working class are sceptical of the modern Democratic Party. When asked by the press why he was boxing fries at McDonald’s, he replied, “I like jobs. I like to see good jobs.” The pose perfectly reflects Trump’s pitch: a patriotic populist who will stand up for the ignored and despised middle- and working-classes against the liberal elite, and promote good, stable work.
But the true genius behind the move was how it made Trump part of the workforce behind the modern production line. The traditional cliché of electioneering dictates that should politicians want to flex their industrial credentials, they are photographed visiting a factory or a mine. Politicians as divergent as Kamala Harris and Kemi Badenoch have seen to update this imagery, both boasting of their hours at McDonald’s in an attempt to conjure up a whiff of proletarian grit. Seeing is no substitute for experiencing however. And in the viral photos echoing around the internet, Trump has outgunned them, making himself the face of this misunderstood political demographic.
Because in our post-industrial service economy, places like McDonald’s are where the precariat are increasingly concentrated. When I worked there, that meant students and people from immigrant backgrounds. And, despite its ubiquity, McDonald’s remains a universally accepted target for class snobbery. The affluent see it as symptomatic of a debasing mass culture, the work popularly regarded as the sort of “unskilled” labour that any moron can do. This cultural divide only further entrenches the position of fast-food workers as the menial labourers of the modern economy.
But it is exactly this cultural stigma that, in an American context, bolsters Trump’s populist bona fides. His love of McDonald’s fits right along with his adoration of Coca-Cola, pro-wrestling and supermodels. He covets the same things as the “average” American, the same things that the coastal elites find vulgar. And these are the exact novelties that have powered his campaigning since 2016: he is not a career politician, nor does he suffer from the stilted public appearances so common among that elite. Throughout the McDonald’s footage, Trump is clearly having fun and enjoying himself. It’s very difficult to imagine Harris, a continuity candidate awkwardly running a “change” campaign, pulling off the same stunt.
Fast-food outlets like McDonalds have traditionally exhibited an image of American optimism, ingenuity and abundance. They feed the masses who constitute a busy, working and productive society. And the “golden arches” themselves are now a global symbol of American capitalism. That Trump can so frictionlessly tap into a nostalgia for this vision of America, slipping cheerfully into the uniform of the McDonald’s proletariat, demonstrates how potent a politician he still is.
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[See also: Where does the next US president stand on the climate?]
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