POLITICS: The Real McFlurry Candidate

They have described him as a threat to democracy, a felon, and just plain weird, but recently Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have taken to accusing Donald Trump of being insufficiently familiar with fast food.

Don’t laugh—let’s hear them out.

Granted, this does not appear to be a particularly promising line of attack, but the Democrats have adopted it aggressively. Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last week, the former President Bill Clinton boasted that Harris’ resume included a college-age summertime stint working at McDonald’s.

“I’ll be so happy when she actually enters the White House as president because she will break my record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s,” said Clinton, speaking before a crowd that seems, on the face of it, likelier to beat a path to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods Market than to the Golden Arches.

In a speech before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) earlier this month, Walz tried to draw an even sharper contrast between his running mate’s alleged conversance with fast food protocols and procedures and Trump’s.

“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Walz said in the goofy, strangely emotive, creepily ingratiating manner to which non-Minnesota residents are now becoming accustomed (and, if they are being honest with themselves, a little weirded out by).

“He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine,” Walz continued, his voice trailing off as if he himself didn’t quite believe what he was saying.

This may be a decent talking point, but it will ring hollow to anyone who has even casually followed Trump’s widely publicized enthusiasm for fast food. In fact, the longer that Harris, Walz, and their spokespeople insist on their opponent’s ignorance of McFlurries, the more they prove that they are the ones who are hopelessly out of touch: Have they really been paying so little attention to what Trump actually says and does to imagine that he is not the politician most familiar with Big Macs?

Let us consider the record.

In 2002—two years before he was installed as the host of NBC’s The Apprentice—Trump was front and center in a McDonald’s commercial for the restaurant’s Big N’ Tasty hamburger. Hosting the giant purple puppet Grimace in an office meant to suggest Trump Tower, the future president held the sandwich and asked: “A Big N’ Tasty for just a dollar. How do you do it? What’s your secret?”

This was not a one-off promotional appearance. In fact, until about five minutes ago, the mainstream media was well aware of Trump’s appetite for, and deep knowledge of, fast food. In a 2016 interview with the then-candidate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked, “When you roll up at a McDonald’s, what does Donald Trump order?”—a question implying viewers’ implicit understanding that Trump rolling up at McDonald’s was a common occurrence.

“A fish delight, sometimes, right?” Trump said, presumably referring to the Filet-O-Fish. Then Trump got far more specific: “The Big Macs are great. The Quarter Pounder with cheese. I mean, it’s great stuff.”

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In the same interview, Trump framed his fondness for such fare as a matter of its reliability: The chains that sell this food, he reckoned, depend on customers receiving what they order each and every time. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he said. This is, in fact, a compelling argument for American mass-production writ large. Custom homes can be charming, but tract housing is dependable.

Trump remained faithful to fast food upon entering the White House, where, in 2019, he played host to the national championship Clemson Tigers football team and invited the athletes to partake in an array of foods that had been—how best to put this?—ordered in. “We have pizzas, we have 300 hamburgers, many, many French fries—all of our favorite foods,” Trump said, standing in an overcoat in front of tables overflowing with open pizza boxes, piles of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, stacks of Big Macs, and what looked to be assorted dipping sauces tidily dumped in their own bowls. There did appear to be some salads, presumably from Wendy’s.

And who can forget, post-presidency, Trump’s visit to East Palestine, Ohio, on the heels of the toxic train derailment in 2023: At the local McDonald’s, he stepped up to buy meals for the fire and police department—a typical Trump gesture of generosity. “So I know this menu better than you do,” Trump told the staff behind the counter. No one argued with him; they know he is sincere in savoring the food they make and millions of other Americans enjoy.

Trump’s consistent patronage of fast food over the course of many decades gives lie to the Biden-Walz campaign’s assertion that the former president would not know his way around a McFlurry machine. In insisting otherwise, Harris and Walz are clearly overcompensating for their own estrangement from exactly this sort of cheap, processed food. Did the duo’s recent stilted, contrived, downright wooden appearance in a Sheetz gas station inspire confidence that either of them even knows where the Doritos are?

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