British journalist Piers Morgan, who writes for “The Sun” and appears on the streaming service “Talk TV,” is no big fan of Donald Trump, and probably would not vote for Trump were he able to vote in American elections. But he knows a good political campaign move when he sees one, and he saw one on Sunday when former President Trump slung fries at a McDonalds restaurant for a time. On Monday, Mr. Morgan penned a piece in the New York Post telling us why it was a genius move.
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“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”
I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.
As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.
I’d argue that it served one primary purpose — helping Donald Trump to Grover Cleveland himself into a non-consecutive second term. But liberal Piers Morgan is and liberal he always will be, but he is also forthright.
First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.
Kamala “Queen of Word Salads” Harris has been making this claim for some time; her campaign surrogates and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) are whining that nobody has been able to disprove her claim, never mind the logical impossibility of proving a negative. But it would be passingly easy for her to prove her claim is true; a paycheck stub would do the trick, and if she doesn’t have those, how about her tax returns? W2 forms list the employer, after all.
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The absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But given the vice president’s track record of dissembling, it’s prudent to be skeptical.
The second reason why Trump’s stunt worked so effectively is because McDonald’s is about the purest personification imaginable of the American free market dream — a place where everyone can afford to eat, and equally, where everyone has a shot at potentially running a McDonald’s franchise one day.
Can confirm. I attended high school with members of a certain local family of ne’er-do-wells, who I won’t name; suffice it to say that I hung around with them quite a bit in the late ’70s when I was affiliated with an informal car club called the First Street Swine. (Yes, really. We even had t-shirts.) One of the four brothers worked through his high school career at a local McDonald’s, ended up becoming a manager, and last I knew, he owned at least four McDonald’s franchises; not a bad bag for a guy with no formal education past a diploma from a small-town Iowa high school. There are probably tens of thousands out there like him, as well. McDonald’s is one of those places where one can start “working fries” and end up making it big.
One might even make it to the White House.
See Related: This Is Why Donald Trump’s McDonald’s Visit Was a Genius Political Move
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Piers Morgan is a liberal. He’s no friend of Donald Trump. But he is an astute observer, as we’ve seen in the past. And he makes some good points here; we should recognize even hardened libs when they get it right, and Morgan has, I think, gotten this one right. Trump’s McDonald’s gig was a stunt, but it wasn’t just a stunt. It also spoke to a whole bunch of people who have flipped a burger or two in their time, and he has revealed Kamala Harris once more for what she is — a dissembler who will say anything, adopt any phony accent, or make any claim if she thinks there will be political benefit in it for her.
