Why Harris-Walz Will Win, According to Trump
Donald Trump would like to have worked at McDonald’s earlier, but did not, and his trying to play catch up with Kamala Harris amounts to admitting he cannot beat her to the White House.
McDonald’s had The Donald on special, cheesy side up, when Trump donned a pretty apron on Sunday, October 20th to playact a work-study shift so short, he did not even bother to take off his tie (and did you notice those fancy cufflinks, too?).
How big? This big? Working hard vs hardly working; DT whipping up a storm at the fryer, October 20, 2024
Kamala Harris has said she had worked at McDonald’s in the summer of 1983 to support herself while attending law school. Somehow that is a lot more credible than Donald Trump claiming he had a sore foot and therefore could not be bothered to be sent to Vietnam. The American Dream plays out differently for different folks. Some get medical deferments and some get student loan deferments, while some get neither and end up flipping burgers for people on the run.
The point is, both candidates know this perfectly well. They are aware that there are millions of Americans out there who struggle to make a living, and who pay the taxes that in part go toward sponsoring the buffoonery of playacting at frying spuds. Both candidates seek to acknowledge the aspect of the American Dream that involves a lot of hard work while sweeping under the rug the huge portion that takes a lot of luck and daddy power.
But neither Ms. Harris nor Mr. Trump can afford to slight the working class, it seems. So, doing well at McDonald’s is important, mind you, and scoring an “F” would most certainly relegate you to the footnotes of history. It is not surprising, then, that Trump’s stint as a working stiff has been an amazing boon for bloggers and late-night journalists eager to speculate about the mass appeal of Trump’s antics to the folks who actually know how to run a burger joint. While some were keen to deconstruct the former president down to his clown potential, others were predictably willing to see The Donald as the embodiment of working-class virtues, stopping short of bestowing outright minimum wage heroism on the real estate mogul.
Obviously, and nobody to my knowledge has claimed otherwise, Donald Trump’s orchestrated Sunday stint at the Golden Arches was not about redemption for youthful transgressions or, more accurately, sins of omission, but something more rewarding emotionally, quite aside from shmoozing up to blue collar America on the cheap. It was about pretending to work, which is, you know, nice, because you don’t really get your hands dirty and wearing a white shirt is, like, totally o.k. (but darn those cufflinks!). Trump, a known germophobe, was reportedly quite pleased that he did not have to touch the French fries. Yikes! “Never touched by a human hand,” he said at one point. “Nice and clean.”
But why should hardly working be better than working hard? Why should make-believe work suffice in the electoral struggle to reach high office in 2024 USA?
Two things come to mind.
First, McDonald’s never was about the working class. Sure, workers of the world unite, under the Golden Arches, if you must, but it’s not about you, sorry. As my wonderful teacher, Mulford Q. Sibley, pointed out long ago, McDonald’s is about almost everything that is going wrong in America: Corporate greed, horrible eating habits, unhealthy life styles, environmental degradation, and – now the workers – unfair labor practices. No need to go into details now; ever since Morgan Spurlock’s shocking documentary Super Size Me (2004) Americans are aware of the downside of grabbing a bite to eat as a ritualized gut-habit. The working poor here are but both producers and consumers in a world most of them are unable to leave behind. But honestly, they are not McDonald’s raison d’être. They are its collateral.
Second, it’s the symbols, stupid! Harris and Trump both court the Golden Arches because they stand for a rite of passage and most definitely not for a place of belonging. Millions of Americans have worked for McDonald’s and most of them not because they dreamt of a career as a working mom at minimum wage, but because they, like Harris, saw the arches as a temporary yoke on the way to a more promising future. The idea was not to stay and labor at McDonald’s forever, but to leave the fryers behind as soon as possible. More to the point, summer jobs at McDonald’s and its many equivalents are not meant to steep you in the lore of Woody Guthrie or even Cesar Chavez, but to teach you the virtues of a corporate canon that is benign enough to let you go on to greener pastures while even making the journey there possible. One not so negligeable side effect on Harris et al. is the sober realization that working at minimum wage until retirement is hell and that having passed through the gateway is tantamount to meritocratic baptism and rebirth, complete with the certificate badge of having been there, done that.
In the iconographic landscape of America, the Golden Arches evoke the Gateway to the West in St. Louis, Missouri. Lewis and Clark started out from there to explore the vast lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Ever since, the longing for a better life yonder has remained a strong pull in America’s collective psyche, the indispensable inner engine of the American Dream.
Thus, doing McDonald’s cannot be about the working class unless we mean by that the strata of our society we must leave behind, no matter what. And herein lies the irony: As pundits in recent days have incessantly repeated the mantra that Trump and Harris were trying to court the working class by leaning against the Golden Arches, we must conclude that the very opposite is true. They have both in their own ways signaled quite strongly that the working class is not theirs (those cufflinks, doggone it!) and that they would just as soon move on from there. Trump obviously couldn’t wait to toss that apron and Harris never did bother to mention her stint at McDonald’s in any of her CVs until it became useful in the eyes of her campaign strategists.
Look, if either of them had been serious about labor, we would long ago have seen them harvesting broccoli or beans in the fields of California, or pitching manure in the barns of Wisconsin. There are still lots of jobs in America that have the potential to teach politicians the virtues of getting your hands dirty while making an honest living.
Still, Trump’s attempt at emulating the drudgery of a wage earner was an inflection point in the race to the White House similar to Mr. Biden’s desperado call for God during his interview with George Stephanopoulos. I argued then that President Biden had his back against the wall when he invoked the Almighty and I predicted that he would quit the race two weeks before he did.
The question at this point in the race is not who scored at McDonald’s, but who passed through the Golden Arches first. Harris did, forty years before Trump. But that is not why she is likely to win, in my view, but if she wins, it will be because she lured Trump into imitating her. She had set the agenda (Hey, I almost forgot, I worked at McDonald’s once…) and Trump knew no better than to mock her, admitting defeat in the struggle of gaining the upper hand at symbol management. Trump donning an apron was an act of submission to Harris. More unconsciously than not, that will not be lost on voters.
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