You’d have to be a colossal ignoramus, my close friend (let’s call him John) is telling my other close friend (Marty), this weekend, as we discussed for the hundredth time the events of November 5, 2024, to tell me that at this point in the game you don’t know how you are going to vote.
Because we have known each other for years, such provocations are the start of a conversation, rather than its end.
If you have come to the conclusion that one person is worse than the other, there is nothing complicated about voting for the lesser of two evils. Even though people have tried to make a meme out of this, John is saying, it is actually intellectually quite cogent.
What I’m saying, Marty goes on, is that I want to send a message. I live in California, so my vote is not going to swing anything. But what it will do is send a message.
Well then you may as well not vote, John is saying. That sends a message.
John then brought up the most recent stunt of the Trump campaign, which had transpired earlier that Sunday, where he (Trump) worked at a McDonald’s. This hit close to home for me: most of my world view has been defined by the time I spent working at McDonald’s, first as a high school student ($4.00/hr), then over the summers during college, later at the fulfillment warehouse1 and, later still, for a short stint during graduate school unloading the trucks at the store.
McDonald’s delivers opportunity in the quintessential capitalist manner. A punctual, polite and motivated person can learn a range of skills from flipping burgers, making pancakes and filling fry containers to managing personnel, planning inventory and business accounting—all under one roof. There used to be something—I’m not making this up—called Hamburger University, where McDonald’s would send aspiring managers for training. But most ‘swing managers’ and employees learned many of the aforementioned skills by just showing up and being curious.
Things I learned at McDonald’s: hamburgers and cheeseburgers get exactly two pickles; fill the drink cup with the trowel, not by dunking it into the ice trough; always make sure the lid on the coffee is tightly sealed2; always rotate the cold stock when it comes in off the truck, minding expiration dates; do not pick up and eat a french fry that has fallen on the table, no matter how clean it looks; never, ever eat fast food within an hour of emptying the oil from the fry vats; the 5 second rule always applies during a lunch rush.
Other things I learned: it is in the best interests of your employer to pay you as little as possible for the work you do, but it is also in his best interests to pay you as much as is necessary to retain your employment. Whereas the stores have varied hours, the warehouse never closes. Sitting warm around the hearth on Christmas eve or watching fireworks on July Fourth…someone is working in a McDonald’s warehouse somewhere loading a truck with nuggets and fries and milkshake mix and enormous pallets of frozen 10:1 and 4:1 all American beef patties. Pause a second to think about the swarm of activity necessary to make possible the menagerie we awaken to every day, whether it’s the profound, like the absence of chaos on our city streets and the lack of foreign armies at our shores, or the quotidian, like the ready availability of a bucket of fried chicken, a flat screen TV or a coronary artery bypass graft.
If we accept the premise, I say to John and Marty, that all politics is theater especially at this stage of the game, then can we talk about the response to Trump’s McDonald’s stunt, rather than whether it was genuine?
There was a slew of online comments to the effect of, well he’s getting ready for his next job (i.e. after he loses the election). Many people remarked on his weight and potential LDL cholesterol numbers. Some got cute with references to the Hamburglar and prison. Someone called @ILOVECATS_19823 said, he can do that for a photo-op for an hour, try doing that all day every day to pay the rent.
There was another slew of comments to the effect of, what a boss move. VP Harris unnecessarily muddled her own employment past with a reference to previously working at the Golden Arches and Trump shows up, says he never did, and then does. A gifted actor and unparalleled showman, he evinced interest in the functionality of the store, the mechanics of the drive thru, the elegant depositing of fries into the iconic containers. Trump has never hidden his Philistine instincts, from WWE to ketchup on steaks (to name perhaps the less colorful ones).
Trump making fries and working the drive thru at a McDonald’s means to half the country he’s an out of touch jackass and to the other half he’s a pretty straightforward person.4
I think I speak for all McDonald’s alumni as well as countless other red blooded Americans in stating I was crestfallen when, pandering to the mob of vegetarian health nuts and climate wack jobs (probably all DEMOCRATS!), McDonald’s stopped listing on its billboards the millions of burgers it had sold, moving instead to millions and millions, and then just abandoning the accounting altogether. I can report that when employed there in the early ’90’s, I received a monthly newsletter where the eggheads at corporate did track and report the actual number of patties they had sold…all time…to NINE significant digits! We lost something as a nation when this practice was discontinued.
Like George Bush the father being fed the price of a gallon of milk at each campaign stop, Harris takes her cues from the machine, John is saying. Trump connects at a visceral level. People vote with their guts, he is saying. You have to be aware of this and act accordingly.
Then you can understand why I’m undecided, Marty says. I want to send a message and lesser of two evils doesn’t do that. And not voting seems to me like an abdication of civic duty. There’s a categorical imperative here. I can always write in Mitt Romney and Pete Buttigieg.
You are a citizen of the United States, John is saying, not of California. Your categorical imperative is going to send this country straight down the toilet.
Alright boys, I must be going, I told John and Marty then, having heard enough. My corduroy jacket is freshly dry cleaned and I have to pick up a tin of Prince Albert and some single malt on my way to the faculty club. The university bought us some new pipes for the fall term. We’re going to watch the Dodgers, I told them, Hanks and Fox may swing by after the game and thank god that no matter the outcome, none of the flyovers will be in the Fall Classic.
McDonald’s has exclusive contracts with warehouses that supply all its stores, which in turn have exclusive contracts with suppliers of all the meat, cheese, ketchup, onions and so forth that make it onto the burger, which is why a BigMac tastes the same in Memphis and Missoula, Beijing and Bucharest.
N.B.: I was an employee when some bluehair was scalded by spilled McDonald’s coffee and sued the company, leading to the message “The beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot” on the cups as perhaps a harbinger of the crazy, litigious, agency-free direction our country was headed.
This X handle does not actually exist. I am paraphrasing several posts with this gist.
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Can Harris or WhatsHisName recite that? I’m sure Vance can’t. I bet Trump can.
Photo Credits: Donald Trump’s X account and Drudge.