As you’ve probably seen by now, Donald Trump decided to pull a shift working at McDonald’s during a recent campaign stop in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The images have gone viral, and they’re surreal: Trump in his trademark red tie, working the fry station. Trump waving from a drive-thru window. It’s only the latest episode in Trump’s long association with the McDonald’s brand, which saw him film commercials with Grimace in 2002 and serve a feast of “over 1000 hamberders” (sic) to a championship football team as president. For him, working at McDonald’s for a day is a savvy PR move. It’s an experience thousands of people can relate to, and it makes him look a bit more human as Election Day draws near. It’s also a dig at Kamala Harris, who claims that she worked at McDonald’s during college and therefore understands working people. But when you look a little deeper, the stunt also reveals that Trump and the business owners who support him are the enemy of anyone trying to make a decent living in this country. 

To start with the obvious, Trump did not actually “work” at McDonald’s. He staged a photo op where he went through the motions of working, which is different. His “shift” lasted only 31 minutes—you can watch the entire thing on C-SPAN—and he spent a lot of it either answering questions from the press or just standing around. That is not what “work” looks like for most people. Nobody hit Trump with the phrase coined by McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc to berate his employees for pausing or slowing down: “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” (Kroc’s smug little rhyme has made generations of workers sympathize with Kanye West’s mantra instead: “If my manager insults me again / I will be assaulting him.”) Trump didn’t have to stand in the kitchen for eight or ten hours, sweating and inhaling grease fumes. Moreover, a Snopes investigation shows that all of the customers he served were screened by the Secret Service and interviewed by his campaign staff ahead of time, waiting as long as an hour and a half before they actually reached the drive-thru. Nobody was ever going to scream at Trump for getting their order wrong, tie up the line trying to use an expired coupon, or clog the toilet and force him to plunge it—frustrations and indignities that actual low-wage workers have to deal with all the time. More importantly, Trump didn’t have to rely on the pittance McDonald’s pays its workers to keep a roof over his head, or worry if he was going to be scheduled for enough hours to pay the electric bill that week. He’s never had to worry about things like that. So the idea that he understands American workers and their struggles now, just because he showed up and slung some fries for half an hour, is both ridiculous and insulting.

For that matter, the particular McDonald’s franchise that Trump visited is known in Pennsylvania for being anti-worker. Like many fast-food chains, McDonald’s has a franchise model in which local “entrepreneurs” can buy stores (or rather, the license to operate them and receive a cut of the profits). This is convenient for the company, since workers are considered employees of the franchisee, not McDonald’s itself—so when there are workplace disputes or abuses, the parent company is shielded from liability. It also makes McDonald’s franchisees a key part of what New York Times Opinion Columnist Jamelle Bouie calls the “small-business tyrant” class:

Who or what is the small-business tyrant? It’s the business owner whose livelihood rests on a steady supply of low-wage labor, who opposes unions, who resents even the most cursory worker protections and employee safety regulations and who views those workers as little more than extensions of himself, to use as he sees fit.

 

The small-business tyrant is, to borrow an argument from the writer and podcaster Patrick Wyman, an especially reactionary member of America’s landowning gentry: local economic elites whose wealth comes primarily from their ownership of physical assets. Those assets, Wyman explains, “vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina.

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the small-business tyrant in question is a man named Derek Giacomantonio. Over the years, he’s been embroiled in a variety of controversies relating to the wages and working conditions at his McDonald’s locations, and he’s always landed on the side of keeping wages low. Shortly after Trump’s little stunt, Reddit user “GarysCrispLettuce” discovered that Giacomantonio had submitted a public comment to the Pennsylvania government in 2018, lobbying against a proposed change to the state’s rules around overtime pay. The change would have raised the threshold for overtime exemptions, so that a salaried worker—like a McDonald’s manager—would have to make $47,892 before they were no longer eligible for overtime, instead of the previous number of $23,660. In practical terms, that means that employers like Giacomantonio would have to actually pay overtime if they worked their managers longer than a standard 40-hour week, instead of hiding behind the law to not pay them any additional money for additional work. Giacomantonio wasn’t happy about that prospect at all, and wrote in his comment that the change would “force me to take employees that are currently in a leadership position and make them hourly, which could mean a loss in pay.” In other words, he admitted that he would rather demote people than pay them decent overtime, or just keep their work schedules within a reasonable 40-hour limit. (Helpfully, he also included his email address in this public record. If you’re inclined to yell at him, it’s derek.giacomantonio@partners.mcd.com, or at least it was in 2018.)

It shouldn’t be surprising that it was this particular business owner who invited Donald Trump to glad-hand the crowds at his McDonald’s. At another campaign event in Pennsylvania, Trump recently admitted that he “hates” paying people overtime, too: 

“I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime, I hated it. I’d get other people—I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”

In case anyone missed the point, Trump repeated this sleazy anecdote in Michigan a few days later: 

“I used to hate to pay overtime when I was in the private sector, as they say. ‘Oh, I don't want over—’ you know, I shouldn't tell you this. I’d go out and get other people and let them work regular time. It's terrible. I'd say, ‘no get me 10 other guys.’”

Trump was right about one thing: he shouldn’t have told us that. It really punctures the idea that he’s somehow pro-worker. As Hafiz Rashid wrote for the New Republic at the time, the labor practice he admitted to on both occasions—“getting ten other guys” to avoid paying anyone overtime—has a few names among those of us who’ve worked actual jobs. “Hiring scabs” is one. “Wage theft” is another.

 There’s more to Mr. Giacomantonio’s unsavory labor record. In 2020, he was again involved in a political struggle over wages, this time at a different McDonald’s in Germantown—a community within Philadelphia that has a much higher poverty rate than the rest of the city. That January, a coalition of people from the community held a “McRaise the Wage” march to the Germantown McDonald’s on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, demanding that Giacomantonio hike his employees’ pay to $15 an hour. Participants who showed up in solidarity included a faith  leader from the local Unitarian church, Pa. State Senator Art Haywood, and plenty of ordinary citizens and workers. It was one of many similar rallies that have been staged around the United States. The idea, as Haywood put it, was that if McDonald’s raised its pay the rest of the fast-food businesses in Germantown would have to follow suit in order to get workers, which would benefit the whole community—including business owners, since everyone would now have more disposable income to spend in stores. Senator Haywood even set up an online petition. But there’s no indication that Giacomantonio ever budged on the pay issue. Instead, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was “shocked and concerned” by the “targeted attack” on his business, as if he had been the real victim all along. 

Again, we can see that Giacomantonio and Trump are kindred spirits. During his McDonald’s event, Trump was asked by a reporter whether  the minimum wage should be raised. This was his response: 

“Well, I think this: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, a process that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see, these are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs, and it’s great, and great people working here too.”

As you may notice, that’s not an answer. During his time as president, Trump certainly didn’t raise the minimum wage; in fact, he said during his 2015 campaign that “Our wages are too high” in America, making it harder to “compete with other countries.” As with any Trump statement, it’s worth remembering that the man lies constantly about everything. But it certainly sounds like he was saying there should be an international race to the bottom in workers’ pay. Small-business tyrants like Derek Giacomantonio would probably like that just fine. 

Oh, and just to make the whole situation even grosser, the McDonald’s that hosted Trump also failed its last health inspection. According to records from the Bucks County Department of Health, it wasn’t storing food at a cold enough temperature, and some employees weren’t washing their hands or using hair nets. In the footage of Trump’s visit, the ex-president himself wasn’t wearing gloves or a hair net, although he insisted his hands were “nice and clean.” He also wasn’t wearing a mask. (We are in respiratory virus season, after all, and frankly any presidential candidate exposing themselves like this is reckless, particularly since COVID and flu are not just “colds.” It was only a few months ago that Joe Biden tested positive for COVID, so it could easily happen to Trump and the people around him too). This kind of thing might seem less serious than paying poverty wages, but it’s really not. Workplace safety—as we’ve learned during these COVID years—is a matter of life and death, and it’s routinely disregarded in the U.S. as bosses cut corners and rush things along for greater productivity and profit. The possibility of getting a golden strand of Trump hair in your fries is just one of many examples. It goes to show that business owners like Trump and Giacomantonio care exclusively about making money, not anyone’s health or well-being. In fact, Trump’s administration rolled back workplace safety inspections when he was president, and there’s every reason to think he’d do the same again if he gets a second term in office. 

The McDonald’s stunt wasn’t the first time Trump has used tawdry PR methods to portray himself as somehow on the side of working people. Last September, he went to Detroit to speak to auto workers during the UAW strike—but as Jacobin journalist Alex Press pointed out at the time, he deliberately went to a non-union auto shop, where he’d been invited by the boss, not the workers. More recently, it came out that several people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at a Detroit rally were not, in fact, auto workers at all. In East Palestine, Ohio, he even used a McDonald’s as his backdrop, buying meals for first responders dealing with the train derailment and chemical spill there (which his administration’s gutting of railway safety regulations made more likely) and telling the workers that “I probably know the menu better than any of you.” Using cheap tricks to seem pro-worker while actually pushing anti-worker policy is a Trump staple, and the new McDonald’s visit is just another example.

Despite the image he wants to portray as a “self-made” rich person whose “art of the deal” brought him success, Donald Trump has nothing in common with a fast-food worker. He was born into wealth, “was a millionaire by age 8” according to a New York Times investigation, and received a “small loan of a million dollars” (really more like $60 million) from his father early on. Unless he somehow sheds all that hoarded wealth, he will never be a member of the working class, nor truly understand it. For him to spend less than an hour in a McDonald’s and then pretend he’s a working stiff like the rest of us is an insult. But when you think about it, Trump is a lot like McDonald’s food. Both of them try their hardest to look appealing, but in the long run, they’re really bad for you.