Review: "I WORKED A SHIFT AT MCDONALD'S" by realdonaldtrump

put the fries in the bag :)

On October 20th 2024, TikTok user realdonaldtrump posted a video of the former and possibly future president working at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the state that’s most likely to decide the presidential election in two weeks. The video is titled “I WORKED A SHIFT AT MCDONALD’S” in all caps, which is really similar language to the titles of Mr. Beast videos (“I Survived 7 Days in an Abandoned City”, “I Spent 7 Days in Solitary Confinement”). Trump has had a lot of content-minded YouTubers visit him in his exiled Florida palace at Mar-A-Lago in the leadup to the 2024 election, and this video feels like it comes from the YouTuber world. It’s dense, so viewers don’t have to watch too long, and tries its best to look casual, even though the dense information in it is very calibrated.

The video is 18 seconds long. It opens with the sound of a bell ringing, and a video of Trump standing in the front area of a McDonald’s. Trump is talking to the manager of the McDonald’s, explaining at first over the sound of the still-ringing bell “I’m looking for a job, and I always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phony story so…” The captions for the dialog are in the default TikTok caption font, even though the video editors here easily could have easily chosen fonts that were more presidential.

For the first few seconds of the video we see Trump speaking that dialog in the McDonald’s lobby, but while he talks the video cuts to shots of him working. First we see Trump going behind the counter, then it quick cuts forward a few seconds to another moment from the exact same camera angle where Trump is handed an apron, then cuts forward again to him wearing an apron. Next we see Trump standing in the drive-through window from behind, before cutting back to Trump in the lobby talking to the manager again. Then we see two shots of Trump preparing fries; one shot of him putting the fries in the McDonald’s fry box, and then another of him shaking the fries in the fry basket as he cooks. All of this while those two sentences play, in the first ten seconds of the video.

The dialog is cut off in the middle of the second sentence, as Trump says “so…”, although maybe he just trailed off there as he was talking. The remaining eight seconds of the video are all shots of Trump in the McDonald’s drive-through window, but this time from the outside. It transitions with a shot of Trump opening the drive-through window, and then the window is open for the rest of the video. It’s shot all from the same camera, but like earlier in the video when he puts on the apron it cuts forward to get to the interesting moments faster. Mostly we’re watching Trump hand McDonald’s bags to people in their cars. His original line of dialog from inside the lobby is interrupted by an unseen customer in their car off camera who says “President Trump!” to which Trump replies “well that’s a good looking group, hello everybody”, before waving out the window. Then Trump says “I’m having a lot of fun here everybody!” to a different a customer. And then quieter, to end the video, Trump says “Look at all the fake news over there” to another customer in the drive-through, which feels like sort of non-sequitur with the subject matter of the rest of the video, and it’s unclear what kind of fake news he’s talking about. But everyone knows Trump talks about fake news. And that’s the end. If you’re watching it on TikTok the video restarts from the beginning, back to Trump in the lobby with the bell ringing again.

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The video is captioned “I’ve officially worked longer at McDonald’s than Kamala!”, which is purportedly the reason why Trump is working this shift at McDonald’s. His opponent Kamala Harris apparently claimed to have worked at McDonald’s but actually never worked there. I didn’t hear that story before I saw this video, and it kind of feels irrelevant to the real message of the video. There are plenty of other things Trump could have made a video against Kamala Harris about, but he chose to go to McDonald’s. And by the end of the video he’s talking about fake news, which feels like a return to Trump as a character more than one final joke on Kamala. It doesn’t really feel about owning Kamala, although the formal structure is a little similar to owning the libs online content.

McDonald’s is the true American fast food; in every city in the country, the most visited fast food chain. Working at McDonald’s has been the punchline to jokes in American culture for years, the lowest possible status job, but Trump inhabits the space without making it entirely a joke. Trump looks natural in the McDonald’s, wearing the black and yellow apron over his red tie and suit. He looks like he’s having a good time, like he says he is in the video. It feels silly shallow to criticize this as a stunt to make him look like an everyman, even though that’s the stated message of the video. Trump knows it doesn’t look like that. Obviously the restaurant is closed, there’s been two assassination attempts against Trump over the past year. The video feels empty, it feels staged, and I think that comes across to most viewers and doesn’t matter. The image is still compelling despite that, as theater.

Trump has been a president of images in many ways. One of his other great images, from his first term, was when he catered fast food to the White House, when celebrating Clemson’s win over Alabama in the 2019 College Football Playoff National Championship Presented By AT&T. Trump always looks very natural around brands, himself sort of being a brand as much as a person. But the symbols of American dignity being mixed with American brands, fast food in the White House, the president in the McDonald’s drive-through, is very aesthetically compelling. It’s all America, but it’s two parts of America that didn’t always want to touch. Trump, as a political figure, has removed so much of the aesthetic dignity around politics, which is in my opinion why he’s been hated by legacy politicians, more than any policy or even action he’s taken. Other contemporary Republicans want the same policy actions as him, or if anything more radical action, but it’s the assault on dignity in politics that uniquely he does.

Back in 2015 when Trump arrived on the political scene we didn’t have content this refined. Content has grown incredibly competitive in the algorithm age. I don’t think Trump’s team is uniquely gifted at content; a lot of same content strategies of dense content that looks casual are being employed by Kamala Harris’s campaign too. But this feels like just one of best encapsulations of the Trump era, Trump at McDonald’s,  shooting a video with the same content strategies as YouTubers, making a dense vibes-based moment built on subverting political norms for millions of Americans to view as art as they scroll their phones. Right now, a day after posting the video, it has 27.9 million views on TikTok, and 3.5 million faves. Images from Trump’s McDonald’s shift are doing well on other platforms too. I’m sure it’s been seen by at least 25% of American voters already.

I don’t know what this video means for the present, whether Trump will win this election, who will come after him in the Republican Party, what culture the Democrats can build in response. But I do know we’ll see more posts like this in 2028.