John Jefferson
In the waning weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump found no friendlier turf than the kitchen inside a McDonald’s.
The former president has undoubtedly placed untold orders at restaurants in the iconic American fast-food chain, but on October 20 at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, he ventured to the opposite side of the counter to receive instruction in french-fry cooking, salting, and packaging.
The publicity stunt put the final nail in the coffin to one of the Harris-Walz campaign’s oddest and most ill-conceived arguments against Trump: the implication that either candidate on the Democratic ticket was more familiar with Big Macs and McNuggets than their adversary.
This was classic Trump brinksmanship—accused of not being able to find his way around a McDonald’s kitchen, he proceeded to learn on the job, on camera, with the pluck of a contestant on Undercover Boss—but this triumph was not the former president’s most consequential McDonald’s moment of the month.
About a week after his rendezvous with the deep fryer, Trump took to X to make a bold proclamation: “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” (Emphasis in original, of course.)
What led Trump to make this promise? During his stint at the McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, had he encountered a faulty ice cream machine firsthand? Or, more likely, during his years of patronizing McDonald’s, had he himself attempted to order ice cream only to be told that the machine was not functioning? In fact, McDonald’s ice cream machines have acquired such a poor reputation for reliability that an entire website exists solely to inform users of the condition of local McDonald’s ice cream machines—as in, which ones are in mere working order.
A possible first step towards remedying our ice cream machine nightmare was taken by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who, last week, announced on X that the U.S. Copyright Office will now authorize franchisees to repair defective ice cream machines without relying on the manufacturer. Whether Trump, should he win the White House, possesses any additional powers to ensure the reliability of the ice cream machine infrastructure is unclear, but the viability of his promise is beside the point.
First, that Trump is even aware of the ice cream machine outages reflects his genuinely populist sensibility. He knows what it is like to drive up to—or, well, to be driven up to, anyway—a fast food restaurant with expectations of a sweet treat, only to be informed that the treat is unavailable or that it is such a pain to make that it will be prepared only grudgingly. Some years back, someone in my family went to an area Burger King and asked, expectantly, whether the restaurant carried milkshakes. The reply came over the speaker accompanied by a deep sigh: “Unfortunately, yes”—an answer strongly suggestive of faltering or unreliable milkshake-making equipment. That Trump can relate to this state of affairs confirms his status as a man of the people.
Second, that Trump pledges to restore the ice cream machines to working order reflects his image as a builder, a doer, a man of action. In a now-forgotten 2015 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Bill Clinton presciently and perceptively identified this as part of Trump’s popularity among Republican voters.
“Trump says, ‘OK, I supported Democrats, I supported Republicans, yeah, I used to be friends with Bill Clinton, who cares—I run things and I’ve built things, and you need somebody that will go in there and fix it,’” Clinton said nine years ago, speaking in the voice of Trump to elucidate his appeal. “He’s a master brander, and there is a macho appeal to saying, ‘I’m just sick of nothing happening. I make things happen. Vote for me.’”
This is true even while acknowledging that Trump alone perhaps cannot effectuate improvements in McDonald’s ice cream machine operations. His awareness of the various ways in which the country is needlessly malfunctioning and breaking down is in itself salutary. If you have ever been let down by a nonfunctioning fast food ice cream machine, miffed at the low water pressure in faucets, or aggrieved at being compelled to buy so-called energy-efficient lightbulbs, Trump is your candidate. (He has opined on all these modern-day inconveniences.)
It is good to have public figures who acknowledge the senseless annoyances of everyday life. There was a reason why Andy Rooney was popular on 60 Minutes. I just hope Trump starts talking about grocery stores that no longer offer paper sacks, newspaper delivery drivers who toss the paper no further than the curb, and movie theaters that advertise a movie’s start time without factoring in 25 minutes of commercials and previews.
Can Trump alone fix these things? Probably not, but sometimes the promise to fix something means as much as actually fixing it.
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