Donald Trump's McDonald's stunt was an insult to millions of workers
A restaurant kitchen vet weighs in
Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.
There are now just two weeks until Election Day, though because people have already started voting in many states, campaigning right now is a bit like trying to finish the edit on a movie while the critics are watching the first act. Nailing the ending is imperative, but a lot of minds are going to be made up before it gets that far.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is making some very distinct choices for its closing arguments, but for better or worse — and this is legitimately a debate, not a platitude — the public’s attention will almost always be focused on Donald Trump. The former president is a master of showmanship or showing his ass, depending on what you think of him, and there is no better example than the stunt he pulled at a suburban Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday.
Posing as a fry cook in a closed restaurant was goofy and surreal, and a lot of politically savvy people, including on the left, have suggested that it was a smart play. I’ve worked some dirty and dismal jobs in my life, but never in food service, so I was interested in what my friend Corey, an activist and writer who spent years working in fast food kitchens, had to say about the event. He had a reliably smart take on the matter, so I asked him to expand on it for the newsletter tonight.
We’ll kick off with that piece tonight, then go to some big election news, including a big ballot initiative update and some very interesting insights from new polling data.
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Mr. Trump Goes to McDonald’s
by Corey Hill
On Sunday, Donald Trump put on a crisp white dress shirt and fumbled around a closed McDonald’s for fifteen minutes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He pretended to work the fryer, he pretended to hand something through the drive through window, he pretended ever so briefly to be part of the class that he has spent his entire life denigrating, despising, and ripping off.
There’s probably no better encapsulation of America’s politics than a man of vast inherited wealth, who has voiced opposition to raising the minimum wage, who has bragged about ripping off the people who work for him, who has boasted about his hatred of paying overtime — a man like Trump, putting on a boss’s outfit and hanging his head out the window of McDonalds, telling the people for whom he is dripping with hatred and disdain: See, I’m one of you!
As a former fry man, lemme tell you: No, the fuck you are not.
It should go without saying, but a man who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his racist landlord dad might not have a first hand appreciation for what it’s really like to make your living in restaurant work.
Let’s just get one thing out of the way: Trump wearing a crisp white dress shirt and dress shoes to ‘work’ at McDonalds is as out of touch as someone squeezing into a scuba suit to mow the lawn. Not that he needed to be well outfitted: the restaurant was closed, so Trump wasn’t actually making orders, wasn’t actually facing a ticking clock, and didn’t actually have a boss yelling in his ear. He left just as he arrived, blissfully unaware that a restaurant kitchen is a dirty and dangerous workplace.
There’s a reason restaurants are adamant about employees wearing nonslip shoes: Slipping and falling is the number one injury in restaurants. Burns are a close second. I’ve experienced both. Multiple times. Neither are fun. If you’re just engaging in a lunch break’s worth of cosplay, it really doesn’t matter all that much, and chances are that some actual worker had to clean the floors before he arrived. People like Trump don’t know a damn thing about what this world is actually like.
I remember coming home smelling like grease. I remember, when working at a barbecue restaurant, the smoke-smell that would never, ever come out of those clothes. I remember cleaning up bathrooms where people on vacation seemed to think they were on vacation from the standard operating procedures for toilets and sinks. I cut myself more times than I count. I got chemical burns all over my legs and knees cleaning caked-on baked beans out of a hot hold. I was dirty and tired and quite frequently, sick.
I remember going to work sick more times than I can count. In my early 20s, I sat in an office shaking for ten hours with a serious flu, unable to stay home without fear of losing my job. I wasn’t the only one. In a 2015 survey conducted by NPR, over half of restaurant workers admitted to going to work while sick. Earlier surveys have found that two-thirds of restaurant employees go to work while ill.
It’s not good for the workers, and it’s not good for the people whose food is being served by sick workers. It’s not like restaurant workers WANT to go to work sick, it’s just that “your job won’t be there when you get back” provides something of an overriding directive. There is no guaranteed sick leave in the restaurant business - and industry organizations like the National Restaurant Association spend millions of dollars in lobbying to make sure it stays that way.
There’s no realm of indignity and abuse that service industry workers don’t experience at higher than average rates. Sexual harassment? The restaurant industry is number one for claims. Wage theft? Tops, again. Stiffing people out of overtime, improperly classifying work, stealing tips - you name it, and restaurant owners and corporations have done it, all in the name of profits siphoned from the people doing the actual work.
After all this, service workers are among the most consistently underpaid people in the entire country. Workers in the fast food industry have been fighting for higher wages for so long, that the rallying cry of $15 an hour is no longer adequate to keep up with rapidly rising costs. The National Restaurant Association, surprise surprise, has opposed raising the minimum wage.
This NRA also strongly backed Donald Trump’s first run in 2016. Donald Trump actually nominated an active member of the NRA leadership, Andy Puzder, to be the secretary of labor. Puzder had to withdraw his nomination when it was clear he wouldn’t get the votes. The people who did get the job prevented a significant increase in overtime eligibility and made sure that workers at franchises could not easily unionize.
The corrupt oligarchical forces destroying everything you care about from, the environment to democracy to streaming TV, are the same systemic factors at play here, too. The Republican Party, of course, cartoonishly evil, ruthlessly efficient at destroying things, works hand-in-hand with the corporate interests that push down wages and force workers to work the grill while dripping with flu sweat.
Which brings us back to Donald and McDonald’s. Donald J. Trump, a serial pervert buffoon, a criminal con man, a coup plotter, a rip off artist, masquerading as a man of the people in the waning days of an election which he has a very good chance of winning. He doesn’t give a shit about workers, never has, never will. This is a man that spent DECADES not paying the people who work for him.
And yet yet yet yet yet yet. There are still millions of people who still credulously lap up Trump’s hollow schtick, in part because a corporate-captured Democratic Party has mostly spent the last four decades capitulating to a Third Way vision of bolstering the profits of donors while occasionally paying lip service to their (mostly) discarded priorities of worker rights.
In 2021, eight Democrats sided with all 50 Republicans in the Senate to kill a hike in the federal minimum wage bundled within a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. A 2022 bill supported by Democrats in the House would have given $42 billion to restaurant owners while leaving actual workers in the cold. (The bill died in the Senate). The good work by the NLRB over the past few years has been a nice exception, but still that.
Even if workers can’t rattle off the policy specifics, they know that no matter who controls the House and Senate, it really doesn’t seem to get that much better for people like them. Without meaningful change, we leave ourselves more vulnerable to this kind of vapid spectacle, all too commonplace stupidity fully befitting the end stages of a country degraded by casino capitalism, where the voices of actual workers are consistently drowned out by the whims of the rich and powerful, whose interests are the primary drivers of our electoral politics.
Corey Hill is a human rights activist, journalist, and fiction writer. He also used to work the fryer — for real customers, and for more than 15 minutes.
Housing: The New York Times has a story today about how the prohibitive cost of housing in the Sunbelt may shape the election. It’s the exact point I’ve been making since early 2022.
Buzzkill: The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled against a constitutional amendment to expand medical marijuana, asserting that its description was too vague and incomplete. Because early voting has already begun, the court decreed that votes on the amendment should not be counted.
The decision split the court, 4-3, and revealed tensions between justices.
“Long ago, this court established definitive standards for evaluating the sufficiency of popular names and ballot titles,” Justice Cody Hiland wrote in a scathing dissent. “This court has not deviated from those standards until today.”
This is the third progressive initiative that conservatives in Arkansas have either sunk preemptively or had thrown off the ballot. The state Supreme Court upheld Secretary of State John Thurston’s petty and absurd decision to reject an abortion rights amendment over invented petition signature technicalities, while the state’s attorney general killed a pro-public schools initiative by delaying signature collection for months.
Polling: A spate of new polls were released on Monday, and while many of them were yet more rigged right-wing troll datasets, a few came from reputable outlets and pollsters.
The first poll worth reviewing comes from the AP and University of Chicago. Instead of asking respondents who they planned to support, they asked who voters thought would best handle key issues. Unsurprisingly, Kamala Harris is vastly more trusted on abortion, election integrity, climate change, and natural disaster relief. What caught my eye is that she also holds a 10-point lead on middle class taxes as well as more narrow leads on the cost of housing and jobs and unemployment.
Trump, meanwhile, had clear leads on immigration, crime, tariffs, and the situation in the Middle East, which is a remarkably damning statement about Joe Biden’s failure to stand up to Netanyahu and Harris’s failure to differentiate herself at all on the genocide happening in Gaza and regional war that inches closer to reality.
As for their leadership qualities, Harris has a 51% to 46% positive approval rating, while Trump is way under water, 40% to 58%. Clearly, while Democrats have done a good job hammering Trump for his crimes and moral delinquency, there are a lot of Americans who are willing to overlook his 40 years of public scumminess when it comes time to vote for president.
The next poll, from the Washington Post and George Mason University, offered some mostly solid news for the vice president. Between September 30 and October 15, likely voters gave the edge to Harris in Georgia (51-47), Michigan (49-47), Pennsylvania (49-47), and Wisconsin (50-47). Trump led in North Carolina (50-47) and Arizona (49-46).
The two candidates were even in Nevada (48-48), though Harris held a three-point lead among registered voters in the state. Perhaps the most depressing data point in the poll, a positive approval rating for Trump’s performance as president, suggests that half the nation is experiencing some kind kind of long Covid caused by his mishandling of the pandemic: 51% approve of Trump’s time in the White House, while 44% give positive marks to Harris’s term as VP.
Similarly, there have been more than a few non-partisan polls that have offered much grimmer news for the vice president’s campaign, including New York Times’ polling average now showing Trump with a slim lead in Michigan for the first time since the summer.
There are several possible culprits here, including Harris’s dismal performance among Arab voters and her move toward conservative politicians and Wall Street surrogates over the past month. Harris visited Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin today with none other than former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the least popular politicians of this century. The goal was to rally a vanishingly small number of voters who admire Liz Cheney yet are still undecided.
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Thanks for Corey‘s excellent analysis and commentary!
Regarding the polls, it would be helpful to understand how Republicans rig their polls— such as arbitrarily classifying certain groups of likely voters as not really likely.
Thanks again!
Cory Hill comes across as being bitter and angry, and SURPRISE, SURPRISE, bias, which unfortunately isn't uncommon for a self-proclaiming "journalist."
Regardless who is the next POTUS the minimum wage will not be increasing. Biden/Harris has 4 years to address minimum wage and ignored doing do.
Yes Trump "has voiced opposition to raising the minimum wage," but so had Biden/Harris via their inaction for the past for 4 years.