As someone who was skeptical of Trump’s McDonald’s visit, I find myself pleasantly surprised that he pulled it off perfectly. The videos of thrilled customers talking to him at the drive-thru were fantastic, and Trump appeared genuine and humbled by the experience.
“Well, this is a great job to take at the beginning, and it requires expertise,” he told a customer in the drive-thru. “I'm going through the French fry stuff. It's a whole—it's a whole big process, and it requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it and to do it fast.”
The customer asked if Trump appreciated McDonald’s more from the experience.
“Yeah? Well, I do appreciate it, maybe a little bit more, yeah," Trump said. "You take it for granted. You say, ‘Give me French fries.' I'll never forget this experience. Okay? Now I know how to do it, and it's very good.”
Can you imagine Kamala ever being this humbled by an experience? Her recent hurricane relief photo ops came off as flat and painfully inauthentic by comparison.
Let’s face it, this was a huge win for Trump, and the Harris-Walz campaign just got completely outplayed. And it’s not like they couldn’t have see this coming. For weeks, Trump had been teasing the idea of working a shift at McDonald’s, trolling Harris over her unverified claim that she had worked at the fast-food chain in the early '80s. Trump finally pulled off the stunt in one of the most epic political moves we’ve seen this cycle, and Harris’s team missed a prime opportunity to preempt him.
Related: Trump Trolls Kamala With Epic Visit to McDonald’s
Remember, Harris started claiming that she worked at McDonald’s in college during her short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. But there was something suspicious about it. She never mentioned it during her California campaigns or in either of her books, and it’s missing from a résumé she submitted not long after college. The sudden appearance of her McDonald’s experience in her backstory had many question whether this was just another one of her attempts to seem relatable to middle-class voters. Even Snopes couldn’t find any evidence to back up her claim.
“You know Vice President Harris grew up in a middle class family, picked up shifts at that McDonald’s as a student," Gov. Tim Walz said back in August at the AFSCME convention. "I keep asking this to make a contrast here; can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to make a McFlurry or something?”
We certainly can, and now the Harris-Walz campaign has egg on its face.
The Harris-Walz campaign had two clear options to avoid being overshadowed by Donald Trump’s McDonald's gig. First, they could have presented evidence of Kamala’s alleged time working at McDonald’s—perhaps a photo or a pay stub. Alternatively, they could have arranged for Kamala to pull off a similar stunt at a McDonald’s, effectively preempting Trump’s move and potentially forcing him to abandon his plan altogether. Trump has been talking about working at a McDonald's for weeks! They had so much time to steal the idea and market it as her return to her roots. They can't do that now, and Trump has now won the moment.
While this may not have caused a paradigm shift in the presidential election, the entire incident tells us that the Trump campaign is outmaneuvering the Harris campaign. They seized on Kamala's whopper about McDonald's and turned a potentially minor event into a major political win.
