McDonald’s Corp. agreed to host former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania store over the weekend but said it isn’t endorsing a candidate in the U.S. presidential race.
Trump staffed the fry station at a McDonald’s in suburban Philadelphia on Sunday before answering questions through the drive-thru window. The restaurant was closed to the public for the Republican nominee’s visit.
In a message to employees obtained Monday by The Associated Press, McDonald’s said the owner-operator of the location, Derek Giacomantonio, reached out after he learned of Trump’s desire to visit a Pennsylvania restaurant. McDonald’s agreed to the event.
“Upon learning of the former president’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone,” the company said. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president. We are not red or blue – we are golden.”
The Chicago burger giant said franchisees have also invited Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, to their restaurants. The Associated Press left a message seeking comment on the Harris campaign.
McDonald’s said it has “been a fixture of conversation this election cycle” even though it hasn’t sought that attention. At several campaign stops and during interviews, Harris has recalled working at McDonald’s to spend money during her college years. Trump has claimed – without evidence – that Harris is lying.
McDonald’s sidestepped that issue in its employee message. The company said it is proud of “Harris’s fond memories working under the arches” and noted the often-cited figure that 1 in 8 Americans works at McDonald’s at some point.
“While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ‘80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had,” McDonald’s said.
Trump’s appearance led to some backlash on social media. Google searches for “boycott McDonald’s” briefly surged Monday morning, and some Twitter users vowed not to return to the chain after Trump’s event.
Chris Hydock, a marketing professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, said that authorizing the visit was a risky move for McDonald’s. Hydock said his research shows that when brands become associated with divisive candidates or positions, whether purposefully or not, customers who dislike those positions tend to react more strongly than those who don’t dislike them.
Small companies can still benefit sometimes, Hydock said, since even a divisive position wins them attention and customers. But in the case of a big company like McDonald’s, everyone is already aware of the company.
“Trump working at McDonald’s can’t attract more customers,” he said. “All it can end up doing is pissing some people off.”
But Lori Rosen, president of the public relations firm Rosen Group, said McDonald’s won’t likely see long-term damage from the event.
“The coverage and publicity alone generated from McDonald’s agreeing to have former President Trump work at one of their franchises already surpasses the negative chatter on social media,” Rosen said. “I am not sure if the American people will benefit from this publicity stunt. However, McDonald’s comes out ahead.”
Bruce Newman, a professor in business ethics and marketing at DePaul University’s Driehaus College of Business, agrees.
“They look like the company that’s getting the attention of the presidential candidates, and it heightens the awareness of the brand,” he said.
Newman added that Trump was likely trying to put a different, more casual face on his campaign, wearing a smile and an apron instead of a suit jacket.
As Donald Trump has begun to lose ground among his most robust base of support—non-college-educated white voters—he’s hit upon the sort of strategic appeal that comes naturally to a reality TV has-been: He decided to cosplay as one of them. On Sunday, Trump donned an apron at a McDonald’s franchise in Bucks County, Penn., to briefly pretend to work the french-fry station.The episode was a Potemkin spectacle—the franchise was actually closed to customers for the photo-op, and the customers Trump pretended to serve were MAGA supporters pre-vetted by the Secret Service; those faux customers even did trial runs through the restaurant’s drive-thru lane in advance of Trump’s star turn. Trump and his team had been touting his appearance over the past week as a means of trolling his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has referred to her own summer job at a Bay Area McDonald’s in 1983 as part of her middle-class upbringing. Trump has branded Harris’s claim a lie without offering any evidence for disbelieving it—so when his stint behind the fryers was over, he bragged that he’d worked at McDonald’s 15 minutes longer than Harris has.
Beneath the demented exercise of sending up a putative campaign lie with a make-believe photo-op, Trump’s campaign stunt points up a deeper, more distressing truth about America’s persistent failure to think straight about social class in an age of steep inequality: The experience of working for a living is all too often a purely symbolic floating signifier in our public life, something that is glibly taken up and discarded by on-the-make meme-hustlers and demagogues who contribute nothing to the actual productive life of the country.
Consider as an edifying point of contrast another hoary piece of food-based campaign performance art: the effort to court ethnic voting blocs by chowing down on their trademark cuisines. These pandering photo-ops come with built-in guardrails: Candidates would never presume to make the fare that they’d been eating, since that would be a first-order breach of cultural authenticity. And they’d be far less likely to dress up and act like members of these coveted ethnic constituencies since that would be a simple act of political suicide.
None of these bright-line warnings apply to the practice of social-class minstrelsy on the campaign stump, however. Ever since the Jacksonian age, the log-cabin myth has granted candidates carte blanche to play down their actual socioeconomic origins in pursuit of broad-based political support. That’s how scions of great wealth such as Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were able to campaign as improbable tribunes of the plain working people.
Yet even by these already debauched standards of class representation, the Trump moment marks a dramatic escalation in the propulsion of class-themed campaign appeals into the land of make-believe. Trump is another son of privilege who’s thrust himself into the role of savior of forgotten American workers—yet he has continued to govern like a rapacious mogul, delivering tax cuts for the wealthy, cracking down on workers’ collective bargaining protections, and reneging on his pledges to rescue American manufacturing plants. In his recent appearance before the Economic Club of Chicago, he ignorantly derided the demanding jobs of line workers in auto plants, and at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania., he bragged about withholding overtime pay from contract workers he’d hired.
Yet, in the midst of all this, the phony symbolic appeals to workers continue senselessly piling up. Indeed, just before LARPing as a McDonald’s fry cook, Trump made a campaign stop in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to reprise his pretend role as a heroic savior of American industry; he donned a safety helmet to woo Keystone State steel workers, and then proceeded to riff on the majesty of golfer Arnold Palmer’s manhood.
The squalid and slapdash character of Trump’s working-class play-acting is a symptom of the broader culturalization of American class politics. In the upside-down world of symbolic class confrontation, cultural preferences are an all-purpose stand-in for class identity. Trump is well positioned to exploit this bogus brand of class identity since despite being to-the-manner born, his taste in all things cultural is not particularly highbrow. Members of his political cult have rallied to claim higher fast-food authenticity for their candidate because the billionaire real estate scion is such a prodigious consumer of the McDonald’s product line. In a Fox News appearance last week, Donald Trump Jr. bragged that his dad “knows the McDonald’s menu far better than Kamala Harris ever did”—a claim to expertise that’s roughly equivalent to Trump père claiming a judgeship because of his status as a frequent litigant and civil and criminal defendant before the courts. Still flush from his exhilarating tour at the fry baskets, Trump brandished a “french fry certification pin” at a visit to inspect hurricane devastation at Asheville, North Carolina—the same site where he disclaimed any responsibility for promoting the conspiracy rhetoric that has spurred vigilante gunmen to face down FEMA workers in the field.
That’s the thing about a culturalized class politics: Absolutely anyone can play, on the basis of any sort of ad hoc authenticity they decide to take up at the moment. That’s why it made zero impact on the coverage surrounding Trump’s McDonald’s photo-op that the owner of the franchise had long fought paying proposed increases in Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, and has been the site of repeated labor protest actions. Instead, outlets like The New York Times witlessly treated the Bucks County stunt as just more savvy positioning for the blue-collar vote, while MAGA-addled pundit Piers Morgan marveled that the spectacle of Trump behind the fry station was “was not just hilariously funny, it was also a powerful connective link to regular voters.”
Trump’s not the only ruling-class reactionary rushing to advertise himself as a proletarian fellow traveler. Just as the Republican nominee was wrapping up his whirlwind tour as a pretend worker this past weekend, Elon Musk elevated a stunningly obtuse tweet from fellow Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump campaign bankroller Marc Andreessen bemoaning the supposed aversion of liberal Democrats to open political debate that mockingly echoed social justice rhetoric. “When you’re accustomed to privilege,” Andreessen said, addressing those who attribute bias to Musk’s content moderation on X, “equality feels like oppression.” Not only is Musk the richest man in the world—he’s also bankrolling a significant tranche of the Trump campaign’s GOTV effort, transforming the X social media platform into a nonstop guignol of Trump-stanning, and is now offering $1 million awards to registered voters signing on to his MAGA petition drive, in a stark violation of both existing campaign finance law and non-plutocratic political mores. If you think that Musk, Andreesen, or anyone else in the upper reaches of the Trumposphere is either battling privilege or suffering oppression, I’ve got a large order of fries to sell you.
The brief stunt — which took place in a closed restaurant with drive-thru customers pre-screened by his campaign for security — came as the former president has grown increasingly fixated on Vice President Kamala Harris’ own background in fast food.
“I’m looking for a job,” Trump said to the owner of the Pennsylvania McDonald’s locations. “And I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody who said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phony story.”
In August, the Harris campaign launched an ad highlighting her upbringing and experience. It featured her time working at McDonald’s while earning her degree at Howard University, positioning Harris as someone who understands the challenges faced by everyday Americans. Harris has also referenced this work in previous campaigns, as well. Despite this, Trump and his allies have repeatedly and baselessly asserted that Harris is lying about working at McDonald’s because it was not listed on her resume.
“I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump remarked on Sunday.
While the scene might seem like typical campaign theater, it highlights a larger irony in Trump’s relationship with fast food — and more specifically, with the minimum-wage workers who typically make it. For years, Trump has cultivated a populist image, frequently extolling his love of McDonald’s, Burger King, and other chains. During his presidency, photos of Trump serving a smorgasbord of Filet-O-Fishes and Quarter Pounders to the Clemson University football players during their 2019 visit to the White House made headlines. “I would think that’s their favorite food, so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said of the meal.
In his world, fast food is a conduit to and a symbol of connection with the “everyday American.”
However, while Trump is known for his love of fast food, this latest stunt highlights a stark irony: the same man who celebrates McDonald’s burgers seems to belittle the workers who serve them, as evidenced by both his past policies and current attitudes. And Trump’s latest attempt to turn Harris’s work history into a punchline simply underscores his broader pattern of thoughtlessly dismissing the value of minimum-wage jobs.
For instance, while standing in the McDonald’s drive-thru, Trump was asked multiple times if he supported raising the federal minimum wage. During his first presidential campaign, Trump seemingly toyed with the idea of supporting a $10 minimum wage instead of the current rate of $7.25 per hour, but ultimately said he’d “rather leave it to the states — let the states decide.”
In his response on Sunday, he similarly deflected, instead describing the experience of working at McDonald’s as “beautiful.”
“Well, I think this,” he responded when asked by reporters about raising the minimum wage. “I think these people work hard. They’re great, and I just saw something in the process that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see. These are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs and great people working here, too.
Joseph Costello, a Harris spokesperson, highlighted the hollow exchange in a clip posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Trump is nothing more than a sock [puppet] for billionaires when it comes to the policies that matter for working people’s bank accounts,” he posted.
In contrast, Harris has vocally advocated for raising the federal minimum wage. This comes despite the controversy in 2021 when she chose not to overrule Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough's decision to remove a $15 minimum wage provision from the COVID-19 relief bill, effectively preventing the wage increase from advancing.
She made headlines in 2019 for joining striking McDonald’s workers in Des Moines, Iowa. “These golden arches are not representing opportunity,” Harris said, standing among a sea of red-shirted workers in a McDonald’s parking lot. “We are not paying people a minimum wage that allows a minimum standard of living. Let’s bust the myth and make it clear families are relying on these salaries, and they must be paid $15 an hour.”
However, as economists like Dawn Allcott for NASDAQ have pointed out, if Harris were to become president, her ability to adjust the minimum wage would be limited, as it is set by Congress through legislation.
"Donald Trump, a 78-year-old who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress-up to act like he’s one of us."
“But wage workers don’t just encompass those making minimum wage. More significantly, Harris has also shown support for unions, a fact that could help her garner support from service workers, trade workers, and educators,” Allcott wrote. “Her support of unions could help wage workers fight for everything from increased wages to better benefits.”
The union support Harris has already garnered was evident after Trump’s McDonald’s stop. “Donald Trump, a 78-year-old who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress-up to act like he’s one of us,” Shawn Fain, head of the United Auto Workers (UAW), said at a Harris campaign event Sunday, as reported by The Hill.
Again, the disconnect between Trump and working people isn’t new.
In 2020, reports of two White House housekeeping staff testing positive for COVID-19 following Trump’s diagnosis raised troubling questions about the treatment of low-wage workers during a health crisis. According to The New York Times, these employees were advised to exercise “discretion” regarding their positive tests, reflecting a broader pattern of neglect toward essential workers who, despite their critical roles, often lacked access to the same level of care and support as their high-profile employers. As Kate Andersen Brower, author of “The Residence,” noted, the White House housed approximately 90 support staff — individuals like butlers and engineers — whose contributions were frequently overlooked.
In a climate where essential workers were initially celebrated as heroes, many ultimately found themselves taken for granted, expected to silently endure risks and pressures, with little acknowledgment of their sacrifices.
Ultimately, Trump’s McDonald’s stunt serves as a reminder of the contradictions at the heart of his populist appeal. He may love fast food, but his rhetoric and policies often undermine the people who make it. For millions of Americans working in low-wage industries, the message is clear: while Trump might share their love of a burger and fries, he doesn’t seem to share their struggles.
As the 2024 election looms, Trump’s ability to maintain his working-class support may depend on whether voters see through the fast-food photo ops to the deeper disconnect underneath.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s campaign stop at a McDonald’s in suburban Philadelphia on Sunday has sparked bemusement and bewilderment from onlookers. But the Golden Arches photo op was far from random: it represents the culmination of a yearslong fascination Trump has had with the fast food chain.
Trading in his suit jacket for a yellow-lined apron, Trump, in a branch in Feasterville-Trevose, Pa., took a turn at dunking baskets of fries in oil, salting them, and scooping them into boxes—the well-documented germaphobe expressed delight at how it “never touches the human hand”—and he handed bags of food to a few preselected customers through the drive-thru window. The play-acting at working came as Trump has fixated on Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim of a brief employment at McDonald’s in the 1980s—something Trump has refused to believe is true.
Trump appears adamant to shake any notion that his rival could have a stronger connection to a brand he’s so long adored and patronized—and a potent symbol of America’s working class.
“I love McDonald’s,” Trump said. “I like to see good jobs, and I think it’s inappropriate when somebody puts down all over the place that she worked at McDonald’s.”
In an apparent effort to boost her working-class bona fides, Harris and her campaign have said she manned the register, the fry station, and the ice cream machine in an Alameda, Calif., McDonald’s in 1983 during a summer while she was in college. “She’s a liar,” Trump has repeatedly argued on the campaign trail, with scant evidence (allies have pointed to a résumé that makes no mention of McDonald’s). “Birtherism, meet burgerism,” summed the New York Times in a recent story about the candidate who has a long history of questioning the biographies of his opponents. Trump, while at the drive-thru window on Sunday, said, “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala.”
The fast food chain has become a strange point of competition for the Trump campaign. Speaking to Fox News last week, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. said his father “knows the McDonald’s menu much better than Kamala Harris ever did.” That may actually be true given the public evidence of just how much he enjoys their food. In early 2023, Trump himself said the same thing to McDonald’s staffers in East Palestine, Ohio—“I know this menu better than you do”—before buying meals for frontline responders to the hazardous chemical accident caused by a train derailment in the area.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, wrote in his 2022 memoir Breaking History that when his father-in-law contracted COVID-19 in 2020, ordering in from the fast food chain signaled that he was on the way to recovery. “I knew he was feeling better when he requested one of his favorite meals: a McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-o-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake,” Kushner wrote. Former Trump campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie said in their 2017 book Let Trump be Trump that the former President’s go-to McDonald’s order consisted of “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted [shake].”
In 2017, Politico reported that during Trump’s 2016 campaign, his former bodyguard and confidante Keith Schiller would routinely go to the McDonald’s near the Marine Air Terminal in Queens while Trump waited in the limousine. “Egg McMuffins were often the order in the morning, or two quarter-pounders and a large fries later in the day,” Politico reported, citing another unnamed former aide. The report also said Schiller would make fast food runs down Washington D.C.’s New York Avenue if “the White House kitchen staff couldn’t match the satisfaction of a quarter-pounder with cheese (no pickles, extra ketchup) and a fried apple pie.”
In October 2023, during Trump’s fraud trial in Manhattan, several large bags of McDonalds were hauled into court. And in 2019, on more than one occasion, Trump controversially catered McDonald’s meals for champion college athletes visiting the White House. In 2002, the billionaire even appeared in an ad for the McDonald’s dollar menu.
As to why Trump loves McDonald’s—and fast food in general—so much, there are multiple, seemingly related explanations. In his 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, author Michael Wolff said Trump “had a longtime fear of being poisoned.” When he ate at McDonald’s, Wolff relayed Trump’s thinking, “Nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”
Trump, for his part, has justified his tastes by citing the standards of food preparation. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace where you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard,” Trump told CNN in a 2016 town hall. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s.”