Why McDonald’s could be the key to the White House

A symbol of America’s ‘democratic culture’, Trump and Harris are keen to associate themselves with Quarter Pounders and drive-thrus

“I’ve always wanted to work in a McDonald’s,” said Donald Trump, strolling into the branch in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. Donning a yellow and blue apron, the Republican nominee was taught how to salt and box the fries before he passed orders out of the drive-thru hatch to a select (and security vetted, given he has been the victim of two recent assassination attempts) group of customers, who had waited for hours for their moment. “This is fun, I could do this all day,” he said, relishing the chance to upstage Kamala Harris on her birthday. “I wouldn’t mind this job.” Forget Ronald: Donald McDonald was entertaining the audience.
Unlike any before it, this has become the McDonald’s election. Politicians have long used the fast-food chain as a model of entrepreneurship and American values or to signal man-of-the-people tastes. This is the first time there has been an explicit battle over having worked there. Trump’s stunt was a response to Harris claiming to have worked in McDonald’s in Alameda, California, to help pay her way through university. In interviews and campaign videos, the vice-president has repeatedly alluded to her time there “doing fries”, saying it is part of why she wants to support working families.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said last month, adding that “part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs”. She has supported McDonald’s workers striking for improved rights. Speaking to Drew Barrymore, she said she particularly liked the fast-food giant’s ketchup.
The political optics are obvious. Harris’s time in McDonald’s marks her as one of the people, someone who has had to work for her place at the table, in contrast to her opponent who was born into vast wealth. Trump, by contrast, wants to present himself as a businessman unafraid to get his hands dirty, in contrast to the California lawyer. Drain the swamp, extra fries.
“Being photographed in the drive-thru sends a message, particularly to blue-collar voters, that this is a guy who knows something about their life,” says Iwan Morgan, an emeritus professor of US history at University College London. “It enhances his reputation as a businessman, hands-on, and that he appreciates that a lot of ordinary Americans eat there.”
McDonald’s has estimated that one in eight Americans has worked for them. During a speech in August, Tim Walz, Harris’s nominee for vice-president, said: “Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to make a McFlurry or something? He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.” Douglas Emhoff, Harris’s husband, also worked in McDonald’s and has an “employee of the month” photo to prove it, as he displayed proudly on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show.
But Harris herself has been less forthcoming with concrete evidence of her employment after Quentin Fulks, her deputy campaign manager, claimed she had worked in a branch in Alameda in the summer of 1983. As a result, Trump has become fixated on the idea that Harris has misled people about her employment there. She “lied,” he said last week. “We checked it out. They said she never worked here.”
In previous elections, American presidential candidates have tended to accuse each other of lying about their military service. In 2004, John Kerry’s service in Vietnam came under heavy scrutiny; George W Bush and Bill Clinton were both accused of dodging the draft. Quarter Pounders are the new Swift boats. After Trump’s stint on Sunday, he said he had “worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala”.
While each candidate’s opponents question the other’s employment history, there is no doubting Trump’s enthusiasm as a McDonald’s consumer. In 2002, he appeared in an ad for the McDonald’s $1 range. In a boardroom in Trump Tower, he tries to grill Grimace, a purple McDonald’s character, about how he has come up with such a good offer. “I’ve put together some really impressive deals, but this thing you’ve pulled off? It’s amazing.”
In 2019, when the Clemson University Tigers won the NCAA college football championship, the then-president catered their White House reception with McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, McNuggets and Filets-o-Fish, as well as a few items from Burger King. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, wrote in his 2022 memoir that he knew the president was recovering from Covid when he asked for McDonald’s to be brought to him. Trump had McDonald’s delivered in court during both his fraud trial last October and his hush-money trial in March.
The 78-year-old has been variously reported to favour Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, Filets-o-Fish, chocolate milkshakes, fries, Egg McMuffins and apple pies. In a 2016 town hall, Trump told CNN that he liked McDonald’s because he could be sure it was “a certain standard”. In another interview, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, said: “I think my father knows the McDonald’s menu much better than Kamala Harris ever did.”
Although this is the first election in which candidates have clashed over their McDonald’s credentials – “burgerism rather than birtherism”, as one American newspaper put it – McDonald’s has been political for decades. After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, the firm invested in recruiting black franchisees, encouraged by the then-president Richard Nixon – who believed black-owned businesses could help ease other problems.
Ronald Reagan was a big fan, frequently photographed eating in McDonald’s outlets. It was during Reagan and George HW Bush’s administrations, in the 1980s and 1990s, that McDonald’s started to rapidly expand outside the US. The chain became shorthand for expansive globalisation; the queues at the opening of the branch in Red Square, Moscow, taken as a symbol of the victory of capitalism over communism. (McDonald’s pulled out of Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.) Bill Clinton would stop for McDonald’s on his morning jogs. For outsider candidates such as Ralph Nader, meanwhile, McDonald’s became a target for its poor employment rights.
“McDonald’s is the most small-d democratic restaurant in the world,” says Morgan. “Ever since it came into being it symbolised something about the United States, that this is where you eat or get a takeaway regardless of your economic status in life. You’re all the same at McDonald’s. Its less than stellar reputation as an employer is brushed under the table. It stands for something in terms of its longevity, its place in democratic culture. In many ways, it’s one of the great American exports.”
The chain appears to be acquiring a similar prominence in British politics. Like Harris, Kemi Badenoch has used working in McDonald’s to burnish her populist credentials as she campaigns for the Tory leadership. “I grew up middle-class, but I became working-class at 16 working in McDonald’s,” she said in a recent interview. Labour’s Chris Bryant, responding to the clip on X, said: “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
Badenoch is the first candidate to have worked in McDonald’s, or at least to claim it as a positive. Margaret Thatcher was photographed holding a Big Mac during a visit to their UK headquarters in 1983, but declined to take a bite. “There’s an awful lot of calories in it,” she said. (Her sometime press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, was an avowed fan and became a non-executive director in the UK.) In 2017, Theresa May was spotted in a branch in Maidenhead. This July, Rishi Sunak was photographed dishing out McDonald’s breakfast meals to reporters on his campaign bus during the general election campaign. In 2022, he had said his favourite items were the breakfast wraps, which had not been on the McDonald’s menus for two years.
“McDonald’s has been a feature of UK life for quite a long time,” says Paul Harrison, May’s former press secretary. “But there has been a rapid upward journey in the way it’s talked about in politics. If somebody asks you ‘what do you get in McDonald’s?’, being able to answer – or not answer – it’s the same school of thought as: ‘Do you know how much a pint of milk costs?’
“McDonald’s is a proxy for a few things,” he adds. “There’s a health angle in the UK that is more prevalent than in America. Then there is McDonald’s as somehow conferring street cred, which is what Harris and Trump and to an extent Badenoch have used it for. And it is a huge business and a big employer, so they are an indicator of business confidence and aspiration.” From a practical point of view, he says, McDonald’s has been the saviour of many a politician marooned miles from home after Question Time.
McDonald’s has remained tight-lipped about its increasing politicisation. (They were approached for comment.) Staff in Alameda branches have reportedly been told not to speak to journalists looking for evidence about Harris’s employment there.
Pennsylvania is a key swing state; the early response suggests Trump’s drive-thru stunt has been popular. With just a fortnight to go until voting day, the Golden Arches may yet have a role to play in electing the leader of the free world.
The stakes could not be higher. When the chips are down, a single French fry might make all the difference.
Additional reporting by Daniela Craft-Marquez