Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s campaign stop at a McDonald’s in suburban Philadelphia on Sunday has sparked bemusement and bewilderment from onlookers. But the Golden Arches photo op was far from random: it represents the culmination of a yearslong fascination Trump has had with the fast food chain.
Trading in his suit jacket for a yellow-lined apron, Trump, in a branch in Feasterville-Trevose, Pa., took a turn at dunking baskets of fries in oil, salting them, and scooping them into boxes—the well-documented germaphobe expressed delight at how it “never touches the human hand”—and he handed bags of food to a few preselected customers through the drive-thru window. The play-acting at working came as Trump has fixated on Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim of a brief employment at McDonald’s in the 1980s—something Trump has refused to believe is true.
Trump appears adamant to shake any notion that his rival could have a stronger connection to a brand he’s so long adored and patronized—and a potent symbol of America’s working class.
“I love McDonald’s,” Trump said. “I like to see good jobs, and I think it’s inappropriate when somebody puts down all over the place that she worked at McDonald’s.”
In apparent effort to boost her working-class bona fides, Harris and her campaign have said she manned the register, the fry station, and the ice cream machine in an Alameda, Calif., McDonald’s in 1983 during a summer while she was in college. “She’s a liar,” Trump has repeatedly argued on the campaign trail, with scant evidence (allies have pointed to a résumé that makes no mention of McDonald’s). “Birtherism, meet burgerism,” summed the New York Times in a recent story about the candidate who has a long history of questioning the biographies of his opponents. Trump, while at the drive-thru window on Sunday, said, “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala.”
The fast food chain has become a strange point of competition for the Trump campaign. Speaking to Fox News last week, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. said his father “knows the McDonald’s menu much better than Kamala Harris ever did.” That may actually be true given the public evidence of just how much he enjoys their food. In early 2023, Trump himself said the same thing to McDonald’s staffers in East Palestine, Ohio—“I know this menu better than you do”—before buying meals for frontline responders to the hazardous chemical accident caused by a train derailment in the area.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, wrote in his 2022 memoir Breaking History that when his father-in-law contracted COVID-19 in 2020, ordering in from the fast food chain signaled that he was on the way to recovery. “I knew he was feeling better when he requested one of his favorite meals: a McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-o-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake,” Kushner wrote. Former Trump campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie said in their 2017 book Let Trump be Trump that the former President’s go-to McDonald’s order consisted of “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted [shake].”
In 2017, Politico reported that during Trump’s 2016 campaign, his former bodyguard and confidante Keith Schiller would routinely go to the McDonald’s near the Marine Air Terminal in Queens while Trump waited in the limousine. “Egg McMuffins were often the order in the morning, or two quarter-pounders and a large fries later in the day,” Politico reported, citing another unnamed former aide. The report also said Schiller would make fast food runs down Washington D.C.’s New York Avenue if “the White House kitchen staff couldn’t match the satisfaction of a quarter-pounder with cheese (no pickles, extra ketchup) and a fried apple pie.”
In October 2023, during Trump’s fraud trial in Manhattan, several large bags of McDonalds were hauled into court. And in 2019, on more than one occasion, Trump controversially catered McDonald’s meals for champion college athletes visiting the White House. In 2002, the billionaire even appeared in an ad for the McDonald’s dollar-menu.
As to why Trump loves McDonald’s—and fast food in general—so much, there are multiple, seemingly related explanations. In his 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, author Michael Wolff said Trump “had a longtime fear of being poisoned.” When he ate at McDonald’s, Wolff relayed Trump’s thinking, “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”
Trump, for his part, has justified his tastes by citing the standards of food preparation. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard,” Trump told CNN in a 2016 town hall. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s.”