I will admit that it has shaken me to my very core, or at least to the point where I have not been able to get through a post that was supposed to be mostly jokes. On Sunday, Donald Trump went to a McDonald’s in Feasterville, Pa., that I have previously visited plenty of times, a McDonald’s just down from the restaurant where my high school girlfriend worked. (That restaurant is now an AutoZone.)
Trump was there for a photo op designed to push the story, which has been a favorite among the sort of people that would like this kind of thing, that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s. Though there’s no record of that gig—paper short-term employment records from 1983 wouldn’t have been kept, I am forced to explain seriously—the Washington Post writes that McDonald’s “accepts” that Harris worked there. Trump's stunt was obviously a bit of pointless political theater; Trump was there for a photo op that would be considered embarrassing were it done by anyone else on the planet but the planet’s most embarrassing man. It was nonetheless covered pretty straightforwardly by the media, as they tend to do with Trump. He pretended to be a McDonald’s employee for 15 minutes; many news outlets used a headline that he “worked” there.
The Post’s writeup of the event opens with a sentence about Trump manning the fry station and ends with “but he dodged a question about increasing the minimum wage.” This, to me, is an odd thing to center in a story about Donald Trump. This is a man who, last week, opened a rally in Western Pennsylvania by praising the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick. The man’s speeches are both disgusting and incoherent, even more so than they have been over his near-decade of giving disgusting and incoherent speeches; he previously attempted a very dumb coup, he’s called for mass deportations and public violence against basically anyone he doesn’t like, he concocts racist lies. In that context, kicking off an address by joking about Arnold Palmer’s giant hog is absolutely the most likable thing Trump has said all campaign. But, yes, he also dodged a question about the minimum wage while hanging out a drive-thru window at a closed McDonald’s.
Oh, yeah: The McDonald's was closed to customers while Trump was there. To give the Post’s story some credit, the article does contain pertinent information about the event not long after the intro:
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.
Every McDonald’s should have to do this kind of stunt daily. Close down the restaurant, load up the drive-thru with pre-selected cars, and have them just take whatever the hell the person hands outside the window. There should even be a group of cheering supporters across the street with cheerful signs that read like “Fuck Burger King” or whatever.
Trump said he “worked” for 15 minutes. We know from reports of his diet that he does love to eat McDonald’s; the New York Times says Trump told reporters he'd “wanted to work at McDonald’s all his life.” The Times story, which is a bit cheekier than the Post’s, spends its seventh paragraph explaining what French cuffs are.
I am getting off track here. Look, I have been distracted. Donald Trump visited a McDonald’s on Street Road in Feasterville, one of my McDonald's franchises, and I am still trying to process it. I told my editors I’d write about it, but as I couldn’t attend the thing itself, I am just spitballing here. I have handwritten seven different hairnet jokes and rejected them all. I’ve walked around my house worrying that I have nothing better to say than whatever the Post and Times wrote. I was going to explain French cuffs, too! But I was beaten to the punch!
So, I will go the local route. Let me try to explain Street Road. The oddly named road/street runs between State Road in Bensalem and Lower State Road in Warrington in Bucks County. (Southeastern Pennsylvania was such a busy place hundreds of years ago, they didn’t have time to think of names for streets or roads.) The buildings along Street Road, almost all businesses and apartments and the like, get more spread out as you travel away from Bensalem. But, oh man does the Street Road corridor through Bensalem, Trevose, and Feasterville contains basically every chain restaurant known to man. It has a Texas Roadhouse, which I consider the current best chain. It has a Chick-fil-A. It has a Golden Corral, where there was a big brawl in 2022. And this is all in one parking lot. There’s a Popeyes, there’s a Burger King, there’s a Chipotle, there’s a Friendly’s, there’s an Outback, there’s a Chili’s, there’s a Don Mezcal, there’s a Dunkin Donuts, there’s a Taco Bell. There are several diners. Bensalem has a large Indian-American population, and so there are also several places to get Indian food. There’s a racetrack casino. This is all on one relatively small stretch! I feel like I am underselling what this stretch of road is like. And yet, of all those options, Trump went to the McDonald’s near where my old girlfriend worked. Earlier today he stood in front of hurricane devastation in North Carolina and showed off some sort of McDonald’s merit badge he got for handing out French fries to people pretending to be customers.
I wish I had been able to go, like when I went to the porno shop next to Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Maybe that would’ve allowed me to process this all. Instead, I now have a 10-month-old son, and I spent the day of Trump's McDonald's gambit hanging out with friends and other babies and watching the Eagles and generally not thinking about what kind of country my 10-month-old will grow up in if Trump wins the election. That was great for my own mental health on that day, of course, but now I am spiraling. My brain is broken. This stunt all means nothing. I cannot stop thinking about it.
