was the image that won the presidency in 2024 not a fist raised after an assassination attempt, but a hand holding out french fries at mcdonald’s?
Wasn’t that a strange place to do a news conference?
—Donald Trump
Was the clincher for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign of 2024 not the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, but rather serving fries to the viewer at a McDonald’s down the pike in Feasterville? If this was so, it was not because Americans identified with him as a fellow worker, but rather because he was serving them. The iconic image featured Trump presenting the fries to the viewer, working for them not alongside them.
Herein seemed to be a core error of the Harris campaign: they were trying to galvanize American working class as workers; Trump focused almost exclusively on them as consumers. Recall that Kamala Harris emphasized that she had once worked at McDonald’s, and struggled with the monotony, exploitation, and challenges of low-wage labor in corporatized America. Her emphasis on her similarity to workers seemed to ring false, or at least fall flat. Why?
Perhaps because since Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Democratic Party has largely treated working Americans not as workers, but as consumers. This was fundamental to the neoliberal turn. We’ll hollow out your industrial life, the Democrats argued, but in turn we’ll flood your Walmarts with cheap goods from China so that you can buy things and feel that you are on the up and up. For thirty years, the Democratic Party has, both symbolically and in terms of policy, treated American workers not as producers, but as buyers. No wonder Trump’s fries tantalized them in a way Harris’s message of worker solidarity did not.
The Democrats thought that they could switch to a worker-based message like that, but they were proved wrong. Responding to challenges from Bernie Sanders and the left as well as the pandemic’s heightened awareness about “essential workers,” the Biden administration pivoted after 2020 to a pro-worker orientation. Neoliberalism was out and a new pro-labor policy and attitude (a stronger NLRB, Biden joining the UAW picket line) was in.
At the same time, the Biden administration crafted economic policy that persisted, in a contradictory manner, in undermining the lives of workers in the full, consumerist mode they themselves had mapped out as the only way forward during the previous thirty years. Biden’s team made a calculation that by heating up the aggregate economy through government spending, but risking inflation (which indeed arrived just as expected) they could prevent a Covid recession. It seemed for a time that the federal government would rise to the occasion to help Americans manage the crisis. It certainly communicated that the Biden administration would help Wall Street avoid a meltdown of the US economy as a whole. This worked compared to other nations at the aggregate level.
However, inflation hit lower-wage workers hard. It did so not in their roles as laborers, but in their identities as consumers. The middle and upper classes could weather inflation, but those who were at the edge of making it could not handle rising prices for basic goods such as gas, milk, meat, and the like. Investing government spending in their lives as workers, the Biden administration destroyed their chances as consumers. Having heated up the economy and offering vague promises of employment in coming years as America “built back better” (mostly experienced by everyday Americans as more construction on their streets and highways rather than help!), the Biden administration then abandoned this investment. They tried to cool inflation by raising interest rates and leaving off with Covid-era public funding. And whom did that hurt most of all? The same working class they claimed to help, again in their role as buyers, this time in their consuming hopes to be home owners as mortgages rose in cost. Inflation went down, but so too did the option of purchasing a home.
In short, the Biden administration portrayed itself as the party of American workers, but the workers said, we aren’t workers, we are consumers. You told us that was our identity for decades. Why would we change that orientation now.
Harris largely continued this approach. I’m a McDonald’s worker too, she proposed in her campaign (she did actually work at McDonald’s at one point despite Trump, as usual, claiming that she was lying in typical post-truth fashion). And to her, American workers responded: nah, lady. They turned to Trump and smiled. Serve up the fries, boss.
Once the Republican Party renamed them “freedom fries” in the buildup to the Iraq War, when the French wouldn’t go along with the lying propaganda campaign about “weapons of mass destruction.” Now, Trump seized the fries to claim the role of providing consumer satisfaction. It wasn’t about who had grease on their knuckles in the past, it was about the visual fantasy of an upside-down world in which a worker was served up potatoes by the liege lord. That’s what Donald Trump tapped into with his image: a man in a suit wearing a brown McDonald’s apron, standing for a moment next to a man who had worked there for eight years. He was not sharing the role of laborer with the young worker, but of boss pretending to work the line with him. He hit the young man showing him how to work the machine aggressively on the shoulder, as if to suggest not I’m with you, but I’ll fire you if you don’t smile for the camera with me. It was The Apprentice all over again, only saltier. These are for you, he said to the viewer behind the camera lens. These are for you, he said to the handpicked people who pulled up to the take-out window for the publicity stunt. These are for us, he proposed.
Fast food helped Trump pull a fast one. As Helen Rosner pointed out in a 2019 New Yorker article:
Trump’s affinity for fast food has been well documented since the earliest days of his public life. In the nineties and early two-thousands, he filmed commercials for Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. On the campaign trail, at a televised CNN town hall, he explained to Anderson Cooper that he enjoyed “a fish delight,” referring to the Filet-o-Fish. He continued, “The Big Macs are great. The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff.” Trump seemed to relish posing with fast food, especially the winking high-low of Instagram photos of himself eating value meals on his private plane: here’s Donald Trump grinning with a bucket of K.F.C., there’s Donald Trump grinning with a Big Mac and a cardboard sleeve of fries.
Trump offers working-class Americans a dazzling, magical mix of grandiosity and debasement. I can bring this crap into the highest places of political power, he proposes, the White House, Air Force One. These are no more fancy than the McDonald’s drive-thru booth. You belong here, is the message. And yet you don’t and you never will. If one watches the video of Trump’s visit to Feasterville (you can’t make these names up if you tried), he continually ribs the young man showing him how to work the fryer, suggesting that he better be careful what he says about whether he likes his job since his boss is right there, off camera. This is the boss’s boss talking, in other words, and don’t forget it.
What is on display in the image is not the fantasy, really, that Trump is like you, or you can be like him, but rather that you will never be him or those like him, but he will spend a few minutes shoving some fries in your face. A cornucopia awaits, but always remember that you are lucky to get even a temporary taste.
In a sense, the Democrats have been saying the same thing to the American worker since the 1990s. Neoliberalism denigrated labor and celebrated consumer recuperation for that immiseration and insult. When they tried to switch to a different—in some sense an older—vision of a producerist identity rather than a consumerist one, it did not translate. Offer the short-term pleasure of the Happy Meal for years over the long-term stability of industrial employment and don’t expect people to reject it suddenly for something more solid and lasting.
Consumed by Trump’s appeal to their consumer identities, knowing well that their employment opportunities are grim, gig-like, exploited, and getting worse, Americans in the lower levels of the economic system took the fries and drove off. The Democratic Party will have to work a lot harder to shift what they have created.