Remember the creepy clown sightings that started in 2016? All over the world, scary clowns started popping up, terrifying small children. The trend also frightened executives at McDonald’s, who started to phase out Ronald McDonald as a result of the “current climate around clown sightings in communities”.
Eight years later there has been another spooky clown sighting at a McDonald’s in the Feasterville, Pennsylvania, community. On Sunday Donald Trump popped into the Philadelphia-area fast-food restaurant to serve french fries to hungry passers-by. Or, more accurately, to take photos of himself cosplaying as a minimum wage worker. The former president didn’t work a real shift: the franchise was reportedly closed for normal business hours and the customers who passed through the drive-thru in the 30 minutes he stuck around were all pre-screened.
Whoever screened the punters must have got a thumbs-up from Trump after the event, because he clearly approved of the Feasterville clientele. “Hello, how are you?” Trump says cheerfully in a video from his shift, as he hands a bag of food to a blonde woman in a car. “What a beautiful woman. Look at the beautiful child, the whole – it’s like the perfect looking person.”
What exactly was this little stunt in aid of? Well, Trump only does things out of self-interest or out of spite. In this case, he was trolling Kamala Harris, who has talked about working at a McDonald’s while she was a student in the 1980s. The vice-president has used this anecdote to emphasize that, unlike Trump, she comes from the middle class and wasn’t raised with a silver spoon in her mouth. Trump is weirdly hung up on Harris’s McDonald’s work history and insists, without any evidence, that she is lying. He chose Harris’s 60th birthday for his fast-food photo op in an apparent attempt to show her who’s boss. I’m sure she lost a lot of sleep over it.
It’s not exactly a secret that Trump isn’t fond of paying for things: hundreds of workers and contractors have accused the former president of not paying his bills. So it’s also possible that, as well as being a dig at Harris, Trump arranged his McDonald’s shift because he wanted a free lunch. He’s certainly fond of fast food. During his stint in the White House he caused quite a stir when he welcomed Clemson University’s championship-winning football team to the White House with a spread of Big Macs laid out on silver platters. He greeted the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision champions, North Dakota State, in a similar fashion, noting: “I know you people” before adding: “We like American companies.”
Whatever his motivations, the internet has had a field day with Trump’s trip to the Golden Arches and the felon has earned a new nickname: Donald McDonald. There have also been an abundance of McMemes. The head honchos at McDonald’s Corporation, however, were not quite so amused at having their brand thrust into politics – particularly as there was a spike in Google searches for “boycott McDonald’s” on Monday morning.
“McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president,” the company said in an internal message seen by Bloomberg News. “We are not red or blue – we are golden.”
The company also underscored their neutrality by noting that franchisees, who independently own and operate more than 95% of US locations, had invited Harris for a visit.
This isn’t the first time McDonald’s has seen itself embroiled in politics. Last year a franchisee in Israel offered free meals to Israeli forces after the start of the Gaza war, sparking a boycott of the brand in Middle Eastern markets and among pro-Palestinian circles. The boycott was clearly effective enough to cause McDonald’s to buy back its 30-year-old Israel franchise after a global slump in sales.
It seems unlikely that Trump’s brief visit will have any impact, positive or negative, on McDonald’s sales in the US. But the Trump campaign is already using buzz from the event to sell shirts commemorating the visit with the phrase “MAGADonald’s”. “I have a McGift for you!” Trump’s campaign store website says. “I am the first and only 2024 presidential nominee to work at McDonald’s.”
I don’t know about that but, as a Pennsylvania resident, I’d like to share my hyperlocal hot take: Trump picked the wrong McDonald’s for his photo op. Instead of Feasterville, he should have gone to the McDonald’s in South Philly where the late Russell Tyrone Jones, AKA Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan, was arrested in 2000. It has now been immortalized as the ODB McDonald’s and, for reasons I don’t need to spell out, feels like the perfect venue for Trump. Or perhaps he should have gone to Burger King. We all know Trump’s propensity for whoppers.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist