Trump Is Serving Up False Promises to American Workers—With a Side of Fries

Like Donald Trump began to lose ground among his most solid base of support—white, non-college-educated voters—he stumbled upon a strategic appeal naturally present in reality television: he decided to make cosplay one of them. On Sunday, Trump donned an apron at a McDonald’s franchise in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to briefly pretend to be working at the fryer station.

The episode was a Potemkin play — the franchise was effectively closed to customers for the photos, and the clients Trump pretended to be MAGA supporters who had been vetted by the Secret Service; those fake customers even did test drives through the restaurant drive-thru lane before Trump’s star turn. Last week, Trump and his team touted his appearance as a means of trolling his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who cited her 1983 summer job at a Bay Area McDonald’s as part of her middle-class upbringing. . Trump called Harris’ claim a lie without offering any evidence that he didn’t believe him, so when his stint behind the fryers ended, he bragged that he had worked at McDonald’s 15 minutes longer than Harris.

Behind the frenzied exercise in sending out an apparent campaign lie with a fake photo, Trump’s campaign stunt points to a deeper, more troubling truth about America’s persistent inability to think right about social class in an age of stark inequality: the experience of working for a living is too often purely symbolic a floating symbol in our public life, something that is picked up and thrown away by willful meme-mongers and demagogues who contribute nothing to the real productive life of the country.

Consider, as an instructive point of contrast, another gray area of ​​the company’s food-based performance art: the attempt to court ethnic constituencies by eating their signature cuisine. These condescending photos have built-in security fences: Candidates would never dare to earn what they ate, as that would be a violation of cultural authenticity of the first order. And there would be much less chance of dressing and behaving as representatives of these desirable ethnic constituencies, as that would be a simple act of political suicide.

Yet none of these stark warnings apply to the practice of social-class minstrels on the company stump. Ever since the Jacksonian period, the log cabin myth has given candidates carte blanche to downplay their real socioeconomic backgrounds in search of broad political support. This is how scions of great wealth like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were able to campaign as incredible rostrums for ordinary working people.

Yet even by these already debauched standards of class representation, Trump’s moment marks a dramatic escalation in the promotion of class-themed campaign appeals into the land of make-believe. Trump is another son of privilege who stepped into the role of savior of forgotten American workers, but he continued to rule like a predatory tycoon, providing tax cuts for the richdealing with the workers protection of collective bargainingand reneges on his promises save American manufacturing plants. In his recent speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, he is clueless demanding jobs were ridiculed work lines in auto plants and at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, he boasted withholding overtime pay of the contractors he hired.

But despite all this, false symbolic appeals to the workers continue to accumulate pointlessly. Indeed, just before LARPing as a fry cook at McDonald’s, Trump stopped in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to reprise his supposed role as the heroic savior of American industry; he put on his safety helmet to court the steelworkers of the Keystone State and then continued a riff on the great manhood of golfer Arnold Palmer.

Trump’s poor and nasty working-class acting is symptomatic of the broader culturalization of American class politics. In the upside-down world of symbolic class antagonism, cultural preference is a universal substitute for class identity. Trump is well-positioned to exploit this false brand of class identity, for despite being born into manners, his taste in all things cultural is not particularly intriguing. Members of his political cult have banded together to demand more fast-food authenticity for their candidate because the scion of a real estate billionaire is a big consumer of the McDonald’s product line. In a Appearing on Fox News last weekDonald Trump Jr. boasted that his father “knows the McDonald’s menu way better than Kamala Harris ever did,” an expertise claim roughly equivalent to Trump père’s claim to a judgeship due to his status as a frequent litigator and defendant in civil and criminal cases before the courts. Still resting from his rousing tour of fry baskets, Trump waved “fries certification pin” during a visit to survey the hurricane devastation in Asheville, North Carolina – the very spot where he removed any responsibility for promoting conspiracy rhetoric that prompted vigilante gunmen to confront FEMA officials on the ground.

That’s the thing about cultural class politics: absolutely anyone can play with whatever peculiar authenticity they choose to use at the time. That’s why it had no effect on coverage of Trump’s photos at McDonald’s, which the franchise owner has long fought payment of the proposed increases minimum wage in Pennsylvania and became the site of repeated protests by workers. Outlets instead I like it The New York Times nonsensically treated the Bucks County gimmick as more clever positioning for the blue-collar vote, while Shocked MAGA expert Piers Morgan was amazed that the sight of Trump at the polling station was “not just fun, but a powerful connection for ordinary voters.”

Trump is not the only ruling-class reactionary quick to promote himself as a proletarian companion. Just as the Republican candidate was wrapping up his whirlwind tour as a virtual worker over the weekend, Elon Musk raised a stunningly dumb tweet from another Silicon Valley billionaire and Bankroller of the Trump campaign Marc Andreessen bemoans the supposed aversion of liberal Democrats to open political debate that mockingly repeats the rhetoric of social justice. “When you’re used to privilege,” Andreessen said, addressing those who attribute bias to Musk’s content moderation on X, “equality feels like oppression.” Musk isn’t just the richest man in the world—he’s also funding a significant tranche of the Trump campaign’s GOTV efforts, turning social media platform X into a nonstop Trump advocacy gin, and is now offering $1 million in rewards to registered voters who sign his MAGA petition, dramatically violating both existing law on election campaign financing and non-plutocratic political dispositions. If you believe that Musk, Andreessen, or anyone else in the upper reaches of the Trumposphere is either fighting for privilege or suffering oppression, I can sell you a large order of fries.