What Trump did is a pretty common publicity stunt.
Yesterday, in an effective campaign stunt, Donald Trump went and served a shift at the drive-thru window of a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia suburbs. Nominally billed by his campaign as a shot at Kamala Harris’s expense — Harris claimed during her failed 2019 bid for the presidency to have once worked at McDonald’s when she was younger, but can provide no evidence of it — it was really just an opportunity to get Trump out there to gladhand with friendly voters for the cameras. (Trump, forever the showman, has been doing bits like this long before he ever became a politician; he is acutely aware of how much people enjoy “rich guy does normal guy job” stunts.)
It went perfectly for him as far as political salesmanship is concerned, and the images of Trump working the fry cooker — “Never touches the human hand,” he remarks approvingly as he fills one order — or handing out food orders at the window while wearing an ill-fitting apron are going to play very well as light, humanizing entertainment. Trump was clearly having an enormous amount of fun, and who wouldn’t in that case?
The Left, that’s who. If the tenor of the coverage from the media and Democratic commentators online is anything to go by, what Donald Trump just did with this quotidian and upbeat campaign stunt was the worst affront to the sanctity of American politics since January 6. As I write this, MSNBC alone is now 18 hours deep into a recurring series of mini-tantrums about it, the most telling of which came in the afternoon as they broke free from other news to both run footage of Trump learning the ropes of the fry machine and to wail in agony about it. Meanwhile the online commentary from the media world’s elites was best captured by Bill Kristol muttering that “McDonalds hires convicted criminals” and the reliably odious David Frum averring that every politician has worked the fry cooker, pretty much, and then attempting to prove it by posting picture after picture of famous people performing unrelated acts with food.
It’s the overreaction that says everything about the state of the race right now. What Trump did is a pretty common publicity stunt, after all, not something to spend an entire day shrieking about online. (In fact, I well remember Trump nemesis Mark Cuban “managing” a Dairy Queen for a day for the cameras to apologize for insulting them in public.) The New York Times led their coverage by huffily focusing on how Trump was “smearing Harris” by making “unsubstantiated claims” that Harris never actually worked at a McDonalds. The truth of the matter is (1) nobody really cares why Trump did it, it just gave him an opportunity to mingle with the masses and show off his retail political skills to the national media; (2) nobody actually thinks Kamala Harris is telling the truth about having worked at McDonalds, it’s understood by all that this was a lie she told back in 2019 without expecting it to haunt her — so you really don’t want to pursue that angle too far. (The New York Times itself pointedly refuses to investigate; it hilariously argues that Harris’s employment there was “confirmed by the campaign and a friend” — in other words, it hasn’t been confirmed at all.)
Yes, the “joy” is truly gone from the Harris campaign, and perceptibly seems to have found lodging in a defiantly upbeat Trump operation instead. Trump has a truly demotic touch — this will reach precisely the sorts of regular-person voters both sides desperately need — and the ease with which he does stunts like this is all the more enraging for Democrats saddled with a bubble-wrapped, awkward ignoramus as their avatar. And Donald Trump, so often on the defensive back-foot throughout this campaign, is now riding high and content to listen to tens of thousands of enraged Harris fans rant at him about his evil ways. Because he, like the old joke, got for once to honestly respond: “I’m sorry sir, this is a McDonald’s.”