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Trump fakes a stint at McDonald’s today

Published on 68 Comments on Trump fakes a stint at McDonald’s today

Donald Trump worked at a McDonald's today!

It's heartwarming to see Trump serving the little people, sort of like Jesus did. But you will be unsurprised to learn that it was all staged. The store itself was shut down for the day:

The cars coming up to the drive-thru window were full of handpicked Trump supporters:

Is this the ultimate in being on-brand? Trump stages himself waving to nonexistent crowds when he get off planes. He stages the cameras at his rallies so that they don't show the arena is half empty and people are leaving. He stages "press conferences" where only friendly faces are allowed. He pretends to pray during his staged visits to churches. Now he stages a few minutes of "working" at McDonald's.

Here's how the Washington Post reported it:

Former president Donald Trump briefly visited a McDonald’s in a town between Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J., as part of an effort to again assert a claim he has made without evidence that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s.

The Los Angeles Times did the same, even though the rest of the story made it plain the reporters knew the event was staged and they were going out of their way not to mention it:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump visited a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday as he stepped up his criticism of Democrat Kamala Harris and dug into his claim, spread without offering evidence, that she never worked at the fast-food chain while in college.

The Wall Street Journal put up a video that was carefully edited to hide the fact that it was all fake. The New York Times mentioned Trump's Potemkin McDonald's visit only in a subhead:

Former President Donald J. Trump renewed an unsubstantiated attack on her at a McDonald’s near Philadelphia.

I have no idea why the mainstream media is going to such lengths to actively cover up what really happened. I've never seen anything like it.

68 thoughts on “Trump fakes a stint at McDonald’s today”

  1. bbleh

    I have no idea why the mainstream media is going to such lengths to actively cover up what really happened.

    1. He's entertaining. He gets clicks. Clicks get advertisers. This ain't new.
    2. As noted in your previous post, he's probably losing, and it's getting worse. (Canceling the NRA? Arnold Palmer's dick?!?) But close races are entertaining. They get clicks. Clicks get advertisers. Etc.
    3. Probably also just some keeping the beat sweet in case he does win. Never hurts.

    1. MF

      All campaign events are staged. That's why they are events, not just "candidate living his life". I don't think anyone thought that Trump just applied for a job at McDonald's and got hired for a day.

      In contrast, see Harris's Pittsburgh diner stop. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pittsburgh-diners-fume-after-restaurant-cleared-staged-harris-campaign-stop-mindboggling

      Same thing - all regular customers were cleared out for the Harris event. Unlike the Trump McDonald's event, however, most news media did not bother to tell us that that event was "staged" or "fake".

      Strange... perhaps they just forgot?

      1. deathawaits

        Yeah, but if Bill Clinton worked at McDonald's as part of the campaign we all know he would have really worked. And worked his ass off and loved it.

        And probably eaten a Big Mac, a Quarterpounder, Fish sandwhich, a handful of cheeseburgers and a mountain of fries. Not sure about whether it was regular or diet coke, though.

      2. Citizen99

        OK, pal, did Harris try to pretend she was *working* at the diner? Did she put on an apron and pretend to be serving customers from behind the counter?

        Of course, everyone is cleared out for security reasons when a presidential candidate arrives for their photo op. But I don't recall Kamala Harris ever making a false claim about Trump putting himself through college with a part-time job. I wonder why?

  2. Justin

    I’m not sure why McDonald’s thought this was a good idea (maybe just the franchise owner) but it certainly puts the company on my naughty list. I visit their local restaurant occasionally but I guess that it for them. Heck, I still haven’t been to chick fillet. 😂

    Here’s hoping Derek gets lots of threats.

      1. Justin

        You’re in a war and you are a pacifist. Good for you. On the other hand… it’s still a war and someone has to defend you before they shuffle you off to the camp with your head bowed.

    2. Crissa

      The general managers/franchise owners are just people with money who follow McDonald's formula to success. They usually don't know how to operate the stores at all, and as an employee, my worst days were when they'd show up to tinker with things.

      At my Taco Bell job, the owner did things like insist we use the white part of green onions as white onions for the fancy dishes because he did not know the difference between green, white, and yellow onions, except that white onions cost more per pound than yellow. And the general manager forced all the corrections to the third shift so he could more easily fire whichever shift manager he assigned to the third shift. Every time he showed up, he'd demand employees do things they weren't trained for: for instance, I was trained in overnight dining room procedures and he demanded I run the third taco line during lunch rush after I had returned for a second shift that day. Then complained I was slow at it!

      Basically, the owners are usually Republican and don't know squat.

      1. MF

        Whereas you are an expert.

        Presumably you can find some investors to back you opening some Taco Bell restaurants?

        Nope?

        I wonder why.

        1. Josef

          You don't need to be an expert to recognize incompetence. You probably lack that skill. Or you're one of the managerial incompetants.

          1. MF

            Grin... or I'm someone who has actually run businesses and invested in businesses and who has seen just how frequently people with no idea how to run a business tell the people actually doing the job that they are doing it all wrong.

    3. kenalovell

      Not threats. Just lots of mockery for pretending his donation of his store to use as the set for a Trump campaign commercial wasn't "political".

  6. Josef

    They do it primarily because they're cowards. They don't want to be attacked by Trump. Some do it because they support Trump.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Lazy cowards. Easier to just print Donald’s press releases than to stoop to doing journalism. Of course it is probably in the back of their minds that if Trump wins, they don’t want to end up in the camps with the rest of us.

  8. Josef

    There's virtually nothing about him that's genuine. Other than his narsacism and an overall lack of ethics or morality. Fake tan, fake hair, fake wealth and fake business skills.

  9. painedumonde

    I know KD is being rhetorical. Because the answer is money. Yes, there is some cowardice but it's cowardice at losing money.

    Or look at it another way: they are paid in a round about way to do it.

  11. Massive Gunk

    Closing small businesses for campaign appearances, faking a stint, may be unethical but it is common and totally normal for modern presidential campaigns. There isn't a modern presidential campaign you can name that hasn't done it.

    1. KenSchulz

      Not the point; the point is that supposed journalists didn’t mention that the event was staged; some even implied that TFG was actually serving customers.

      1. Massive Gunk

        That may be unethical but it is common. It's not unique to Trump's appearance this afternoon or whenever it happened.

        Here is a New York Times story about the Harris campaign stopping at a business. It was closed to the public for their appearance but they don't mention it - because it common.

        https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/us/politics/harris-walz-pennsylvania-bus-tour.html

        And just think about it, are we supposed to be outraged that Trump didn't strut into an open McDonald's after two assassination attempts and insert himself into the staff's ordinary procedures? Does that makes sense?

        PEOPLE: Modern presidential political campaigns are almost ENTIRELY staged.

        1. rick_jones

          I can't get past the paywall, but was it entirely staged as in known-in-advance and even rehearsed, or was it a "showed-up and got closed" without advance notice?

        2. cld

          The difference is somebody walking into a place vs staging a video to falsely give an impression you really spent some time there doing things.

          Using a business for a campaign stop may be common but is it that common with a large franchise like McDonalds?

          Is there a clause in the franchise agreement that may have been violated?

            1. cld

              No, that isn't the same thing. The comparison to that would be Trump in Puerto Rico randomly throwing paper towels into a crowd.

        3. dilbert dogbert

          After the shit the Secret Service got for the failed assignation attempt, you would expect they would demand the stores be closed. The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords is an example of why to close the stores.

  12. Salamander

    Okay, so the Felon Candidate faking "working" at Mickey Dee's somehow is "proof" that young Kamala Harris could never have ever actually worked at any McDonald's? Is that the message?

    I'm just not getting it. Perhaps I don't have the MAGA-mark mind.

    2. MF

      He is calling attention to the claim.

      The Washington Post writes that Trump "assert a claim he has made without evidence that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s."

      However they fail to note that Harris is asserting a claim that she worked at McDonald's also without evidence.

      The difference is that you cannot prove a negative but you can certainly prove a positive. If Harris did work at McDonald's she could prove it with Social Security records that she could obtain from the SSA. She also has refused to say what.McDonald's location she worked at. That she has not taken the opportunity to refute Trump strongly indicates that there are no such records and her story is a lie.

      1. aldoushickman

        ^^^ looks like this idiot is trying to revive the birther (burger?) conspiracy theory.

        Setting aside the obvious (why should Harris waste time "proving" something trivial, just because Trumpers have their knickers in a twist over it?), I very much doubt that the SSA has records of employement for people from the pre-digital 1970s, and that if they do, I'm pretty sure you can't just ask and receive them, and even if they did, they undoutbedly don't have records for people who worked in Canada which could well be the case for Harris because she went to high school in Montreal.

        Also, none of this matters. Harris could lie or tell the truth all day long about having worked at any number of fast food places, and none of it would (a) relevant to anything she'd do in office or (b) be even remotely significant in light of the fact that her opponent to this day lies about having won the 2020 election.

        1. MF

          1. Harris should prove she worked at McDonald's because by now most people assume she did not and she wants to look honest since that's a great differentiator from Trump.

          2. Harris is 60. If she worked in McDonald's when she was 20 that was in 1984. It may surprise you millennials, but we had computers back then - you need to go back to 50s or 60s to get pre-digital. In fact, we even had computers in the 1970s. Ever hear of "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate"?

          3. SSA definitely has employment records for anyone who worked in the 1980s and you can definitely get them just by asking. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/centers-offices/human-resources-center/foia/employment-records

          4. Harris has stated that she worked in a Bay Area McDonald's. That is not Canada. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/kamala-harris-mcdonalds-work-trump.html "Vice President Kamala Harris has recalled her stint at a Bay Area McDonald’s 41 years ago"

          5. It is up to the voters whether Harris's lies about McDonald's matter. I think many of them will decide that there is a big difference between choosing between an honest person and a liar and choosing between two liars.

          3.

      2. Josef

        Did Trump "prove" he had bone spurs? Prove he took the SAT? Do you really want to play the he or she didn't prove something game?

  14. ConradsGhost

    Okay, obvious observations (as above) aside, I agree with Kevin. I just read the WaPo article, and it's extremely.....weird that it's not even mentioned it's a staged event, like some kind of Stalinesque erasure of history. But the article itself is even worse - it reads like a barely modified Trump campaign release. This brings back memories of the NYT distortions in the runup to the Iraq war. Kevin's right - there's something very off here, especially when it's repeated across major media platforms, almost as though there's somebody (or somebodies) coordinating it. Chomsky comes to mind, and his writings on the media.

    Sure, ratings, horse race, clicks, etc etc. Something about this is off.

  15. Massive Gunk

    Put another way, the media is not covering it because it’s not a story. They are not covering it for the same reasons they didn’t cover it when the Harris campaign closed down a restaurant for an appearance last month.

    1. Salamander

      But they ARE covering it! But they're doing the standard whitewash / sanewash treatment. Not covering would be there would have been no story, no photos, no video.

      1. Massive Gunk

        I meant to mean they are not covering the (non) story that the McDonalds was closed. Drum says the mainstream media is going to lengths to "actively cover up what really happened" which is an embarrassing misunderstanding of modern political events. There isn't a political campaign of the last 50 years that hasn't closed a store for a campaign event. It's an utter and total non-story. That is why they didn't cover the aspect that the McDonald's had been closed to the public.

        1. FrankM

          You're correct that using closed restaurants is routine and has been going on forever. Usually, though, it's the candidate visiting a restaurant and eating the local cuisine, jawing with the owner and some employees, pronouncing the food the best he's ever had, then leaving. The Secret Service is never going to allow random customers into the restaurant while this is going on.

          This event was different. Not content with the usual format, Trump was pretending to serve customers, who were themselves fake customers. Leave it to Trump to take routine fakery and dial it up to 11.

          1. Massive Gunk

            Definitely Trump will dial it up - and usually that works to his advantage short and long term.

            For example, if we spend time outraged over him pretending to serve fake customers instead of focusing on more substantial issues, such as his unfulfilled promises to the middle class, which could be far more significant to potential voters, we risk setting ourselves up for hypocrisy. The moment a Democratic candidate 'stages' something—completely normal in politics—the opposition will call us out for being hypocrites, and they'd be pretty accurate.

            By focusing on non-issues like this, we end up undermining ourselves in two ways: we give them ammunition to call us hypocrites, and we miss the opportunity to criticize him on something substantial.

            Do you think he’s unaware of this? Do you think he doesn’t employ it constantly to reap the benefits? It’s the same with Arnold Palmer’s penis size. Any time we spend faux-outraged about that helps Trump enormously. He knows this, which is why he does it. We’re in an era where voters don’t care if candidates talk about penis size. So when we engage in faux outrage—something that may have worked thirty or even ten years ago—we not only play into his hands, but we also end up looking outdated. And miss yet another opportunity to speak to voters about something substantial.

            Trump knows this, and these "outrageous" events are like a ball he throws, and we foolishly chase after it every time.

            1. Salamander

              Good points there, but don't disregard the likelihood that lots of Americans will gravitate to these "fluff" stories and their exposes, while skipping the oh-so-boring policy analyses and constant rehashing of history that are, in the long and short term, more meaningful.

              The news should cover both.

    2. Josef

      They aren't covering it the same way they don't cover the lies he tells daily, or sometimes hourly. They don't treat his behavior seriously. But act as if his campaign is. He gets a pass on virtually all his ignorant and stupid things he's said and done since 2016.

  16. raoul

    KD- read todays nomoremisterniceguy.com on how the NYT tried to cover up Palmer’s penis story. It appears to me that the media is objectively pro Trump.

    2. Marlowe

      The WaPo may have taken flak on this story. It was updated about an hour ago and here is the third graph:

      "The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump’s visit, and the motorists whom Trump served were screened by the U.S. Secret Service and positioned before his arrival. No one ordered food. Instead, the attendees received whatever Trump gave them."

      I had not read the original story, but this is appears more accurate and honest than the story Kevin describes.

      1. iamr4man

        I did read the original story and it was revised as you noted. Funny though, they kept this sentence “ One man said, “Trump 2024!” as he drove away.”

        Consider the fact he was a selected Trump supporter and rehearsed, duh.

  19. kenalovell

    One really has to admire Trump's ability (or his campaign team's) to create a "news" story out of nothing. He persists in lying that McDonald's has denied Harris ever worked there. Presumably McDonald's are loathe to lose their #1 unpaid advertiser, so they haven't contradicted him. Consequently a Trump campaign ad masquerading as a news story has attracted almost 3,000 comments so far at the New York Post, most of them fulminating about Harris's dishonesty.
    https://nypost.com/2024/10/20/us-news/donald-trump-works-at-pa-mcdonalds-to-needle-kamala-harris/

    1. emjayay

      The NYPost is a Murdoch owned Fox News in print only worse tabloid. The comments there are always almost all ignorant/MAGA type. I only know about the comments because Gothamist sometimes has links to news items there.

  20. kathleent

    Yawn, Trump is so boring, Snoozefest, Dull, Comatose - hearing about his antics is as thrilling as watching paint dry, water boil and feels like what happens when your legs fall asleep - but it's that same feeling happening in your brain. Imagine this --- so much of what Trump does would get most young school kids in the US sent to detention or even expelled. But oddly so many people want him to lead this country? He needs a good old-fashioned expulsion. Hopefully it happens. We all deserve better than this nonsense.

  21. normadesmond

    We're supposed to keep the line open with Trump voters, but how
    do you keep the line open with people who you have no respect for?

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