Trump, Harris, and McDonald’s: How burgers became core to the election

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. McDonald’s cannot seem to escape the 2024 presidential election. Given how toxic the contest has been, that sounds like a problem. But to the contrary, if there’s anything the two major candidates agree on, it’s that the world’s mightiest fast-food chain is a potent symbol of all-American virtue. Of course, that point is sometimes being made in toxic ways. The latest, and most vociferous, example came this week, as Donald Trump has begun adding to his stump speech attacks on rival Kamala Harris’s stint working at a McDonald’s while in school. “She never worked there!” he declared at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. (This is not true; and while Trump has falsely claimed that the chain said she never worked there, it has, in fact, made no comment.) He then claimed in a mocking tone that “for a long time, she’s been talking about her experience at McDonald’s: ‘I worked at McDonald’s over the French fries, it was so hot.’” As a flourish, he added: “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the French fry job for about half an hour—I wanna see how it is.” Incredibly, this is actually an escalation of a line of attack that’s been going on for nearly a month. And whoever is winning the political tussle, it’s just one example of how the McDonald’s brand has become a sociocultural touchstone. Harris has noted her Mickey D stint since her 2019 campaign for the presidency, and it’s been mentioned in her 2024 ads signaling a modest, salt-of-the-earth background: “She grew up in a middle class home,” goes one. “She was the daughter of a working mom. And she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree.”  This is a relatable tidbit—McDonald’s has claimed that one in eight Americans have worked for the chain at some point—but it evidently triggered the Trump campaign and other Harris critics. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, tracked down Harris’s 1987 application for a law clerk job that did not include McDonald’s experience, and pointed out she didn’t mention the burger giant in her two memoirs. The Trump campaign seems to want this to be the new birther movement: “Why won’t they just provide real documentation and proof?” a campaign spokesman said to the Daily Beast. “The onus is on them. What does she have to hide?” (As The Daily Show’s Desi Lydick put it, “Trump is asking to see Kamala’s burger certificate.”) Thanks to this line of attack, Harris was even asked about this bit of her résumé on MSNBC, where she said that it was just a summer job for her, the experience helps shape her focus on “the needs of the American people.”  Silly as this squabble may be, it’s consistent with the supersizing of the fast-food icon’s role as bellwether of the national economic mood over the past year. For months, one of the recurring themes of the inflation story was the relative cost of McDonald’s menu items, with anecdotal reports of a $17.59 Big Mac meal or $5.69 for hash browns spreading on social media and into the mainstream press. While this was often used to feed critiques of macroeconomic policy, the link became so strong that it eventually seemed that McDonald’s itself needed to act to combat inflation. (And indeed, while it couldn’t exactly cut interest rates, it did roll out a high-profile value meal promotion.) Similarly, the debate over raising the minimum wage in California to $20 an hour was framed in part through consideration of the McDonald’s fallout: Reports that franchisees would have to raise prices, or blaming the hike for shutting down locations. Meanwhile, its experiments with payment kiosks are monitored for their labor-market impact. To understand a policy’s impact on America, the message seemed to be, look to McDonald’s. And that goes beyond economics. Wall Street Journal columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter William McGurn has argued (after citing his own bona fides as a Mickey D summer-job vet) that Democratic policies like boosting the minimum wage or upping corporate taxes would actually hurt McDonald’s and its workers. But Harris’s election would be “a powerful rebuke to those who dismiss flipping burgers as a dead-end job,” he mused. “If she truly believes in the Opportunity Economy, maybe her message to all those with McJobs should be, ‘You too can be president.’” It’s possible that Trump is simply annoyed that Harris might get some benefit of an association with the Golden Arches when he has long been on record as an enthusiastic Big Mac (and Fillet-o-Fish and fries) consumer. But it’s easy to see how a symbolic association with McDonald’s can have value. Sure, it’s a sprawling multinational business that has turned mass-produced food into a truly global brand. But it’s one that’s been built to represent a distinctly American image, one that somehow connotes authenticity. And this election season is the latest reminder, as if