Trump’s new Big Lie comes with a side of fries | Will Bunch Newsletter

I went to Donald Trump’s rally in Latrobe, Pa. on Saturday, and I learned something maybe surprising about Trump voters, whom — and there’s considerable evidence about this — are not the majority of this newsletter’s readers. But they have something in common with you: They are also incredibly anxious about Nov. 5. While one ardent backer predicted a Trump landslide (”just like in 2020″ ... huh?), a half dozen others all gave me the exact same word: “Nervous.” Finally, something America agrees on.

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Ever since Donald Trump rose from the graffiti-covered ashes of 1970s’ New York, the real-estate-developer-pitchman played up a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous image that his proletariat fans could only dream of, from the moment he exited his private jetliner until he stepped into his gold-plated home at Trump Tower.

So yes, it was certainly a jarring moment on Sunday afternoon when The Donald descended on the humble Bucks County borough of Feasterville, traded his supersized blue suit jacket for an apron over his trademark solid-red tie, and worked the fry machine, scooped up crispy spuds, and even handled a few cars in the drive-thru of the local McDonald’s in a brief campaign stunt.

It seemed like an odd salt-of-the-earth gimmick for the guy who less than 24 hours earlier had his pilots fly Trump Force One low over Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe to wow the little people down there on the tarmac. Yet the McDonald’s stint impressed one key audience: Gullible TV pundits who were (dah-dah-dah-dah-dah!) lovin’ it. Kristin Soltis-Anderson told a CNN panel that the fast-food play-acting was “insanely smart” while co-panelist Meghan Hays called it “humanizing” — which I guess is an important goal if your campaign is heavily based on the promise of mass deportation camps and telling America that migrants will “cut your throat.”

With two weeks until Election Day and the GOP’s Trump in a dead heat with Democrat Kamala Harris, critics lashed out at the french fry follies as insanely stupid, and with good reason. Like so much of the Republican nominee’s campaign, nothing was real. The Bucks County McDonald’s was closed to actual patrons for the day. The “customers” that Trump served were pre-screened campaign supporters who even rehearsed their drive-thru odyssey. These were the real “crisis actors.”

But that wasn’t the fakest part, or the most troubling. Campaign stunts like flipping pancakes or painting a wall at an urban high school are nothing new, and occasionally they are disastrous, like Michael Dukakis driving a tank in 1988. But they’re supposed to make a bigger point about what the candidate believes. When Trump pretends to be a man of the people — especially the people who work long hours for low wages in America’s fast-food joints — this burger-flipper is all apron and no beef.

Trump evaded a reporter’s question about raising the federal minimum wage, stuck at a pathetic $7.25-an-hour since 2009, only saying “I think these people work hard.” That’s because he’s never supported raising the minimum wage. And POTUS 45’s seemingly worker-friendly plan to end taxes on overtime is undercut by the Trump-adjacent Project 2025 pushing a cut in access to overtime, as well as Trump’s own words: ““I used to hate to pay overtime when I was in the private sector.”

That’s probably why the private-sector owner of the Feasterville McDonald’s, Derek Giancomantonio — who also lobbies Harrisburg against a higher minimum wage and worker-friendly changes to overtime, when he’s not facing alleged health violations — was willing to lose a Sunday’s worth of revenue to help Trump get elected. He knows that a Trump 47 presidency would serve owners like him, and not the workers who’ve protested Giancomantonio on several occasions.

But the McDonald’s thing would never have happened if Team Trump wasn’t aiming for a much bigger and more diabolical goal: a new recipe for a Big Lie to use against Harris the way that Trump’s 2011 “birther” lie that Barack Obama lacked a U.S. birth certificate propelled the reality-TV star into politics, or that the fibs about Hillary Clinton’s emails helped Trump win in 2016.

Even though this is a McDonald’s, sir, and not a Burger King, Trump was frying up a Whopper. For weeks, the candidate has been making an utterly baseless claim that Harris is the one who’s lying when she says she actually served real customers in a McDonald’s one youthful summer — an experience that gave her empathy for low-wage workers.

The vice president’s campaign, backed up by a close friend from those days, said Harris worked at the McDonald’s in Alameda, California in 1983 while on summer break — and there’s no reason to doubt her. The story offers a contrast that apparently gets under the skin of Trump, pampered son of a multi-millionaire real estate developer. But there’s a wrinkle: Almost no one — employer or employee — keeps records from a summer job 41 years ago, and Harris, as an ambitious future lawyer, wasn’t inclined to put it on her resume. She apparently never mentioned it publicly until 2019, when she was running for president and low wages in fast food was now an issue.

It’s such a trivial thing, but Trump — who’s never let reality like the fact that Obama actually has a U.S. birth certificate stop him — is going to town on this window of ambiguity. “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala at McDonald’s,” Trump told one of his staged drive-thru customers in Feasterville. He added: ““I’ve really wanted to do this all my life. And now I’m going to do it because she didn’t do it.” This is the real reason Trump was in the kitchen — to cook up a lie.

And make no mistake — it’s a Big Lie, despite the seeming smallness of it. Trump’s goal is exactly the same as the ridiculously false story that Obama was born in Kenya, to raise doubts in the mind of voters that the first woman vice president of the United States is not really who she says she is. It’s a cousin, in a way, to Trump’s bizarre lie that Harris “happened to turn Black” later in life. These falsehoods target a specific and large pool of voters: Folks seeking both permission and a plausible explanation for rejecting Black or female candidates that doesn’t sound blatantly racist.

Trump’s aides told reporters over the weekend the candidate is making his “closing argument.” Apparently, this is it: that his opponent can’t become 47th president because he says she’s not telling the truth — even though she almost certainly is — about working in a McDonald’s one summer more than four decades ago. It sounds insane, but it’s no more crazy than a late October 2016 nothingburger revival of Clinton’s overblown email story that analysts say may have put Trump in the White House.

It’s pretty rich from an ex-president who made false or misleading claims not once but more than 30,000 times during his time in office, and often about things much more important than a summer job. Let’s hope enough voters see through the Feasterville sham and send Trump’s soggy fries back. We deserve a break today, and for the next four years.

Question: Is it too late for an October Surprise? — Donna Lamb (@dlambny) via X/Twitter

Answer: Donna, in this crazy, mixed-up world, Nov. 4 would not be too late for an October Surprise. Probably the biggest area of concern for an unexpected game changer would be the Middle East, where increased tension between Israel and its adversaries, but especially regional power Iran, have threatened a full-scale war. Such a development could rekindle campus protests and put new pressure on Kamala Harris over the administration’s pro-Israel stance. Or it could be something as trivial yet as consequential as the late October 2016 surprise of an insanely overhyped rekindling of Hillary Clinton’s emails controversy. I’d argue that what really matters is the long, slow shock that U.S. voters are choosing between democracy and authoritarianism. Maybe the real October Surprise was the fascism we nurtured along the way.

Your opinions were split down the middle over whether Kamala Harris is making a mistake by leaning so hard into her support from Never Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney. Some of you think it’s good strategy. “Clearly the Harris campaign is making a calculation that the bloc of potential persuadable Republican voters who are sick and tired of Trump is much larger than the bloc of disaffected leftists who need to be coaxed into voting for her,” Edward Kazala wrote. But others agreed with me that there’s major risk in Harris ignoring the Democrats’ left-wing base. “It does seem to me that Dems so often take certain segments of their ‘base’ for granted,” wrote Anne Brennan. “Environmentalists were overlooked by Al Gore as he figured he had them already, no need to actually offer them something to vote for.”

📮This week’s question: There is only one thing on anyone’s mind: Do you think Trump or Harris is winning the election? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Election winner” in the subject line.

Maybe Donald Trump needs to do a late edit on that Two Minutes Hate video he now shows at his rallies linking migrants to a handful of high-profile crimes committed against U.S. citizens. Because there are widespread accusations — from leading public figures and politicians, including Trump’s fellow Republicans — that an immigrant is currently crisscrossing Pennsylvania on a one-man crime spree from downtown Pittsburgh to Ridley High School. Some of them have turned his name over to the U.S. Justice Department: Elon Reeve Musk, age 53, native of South Africa.

OK, to be clear: Musk — the electric-vehicle-and-space entrepreneur whose $247 billion net worth makes him the world’s richest man — became a U.S. citizen in 2002, and he’s not currently charged with any crime. But that’s the point of this item. The nation’s leading election-law experts, as well as elected officials well versed in the supposed rules of campaign finance, are saying that Musk is flagrantly flouting the lawbook with his recent political antics on Trump’s behalf. It’s highlighted by his $105-million-and-counting America PAC staging a $1-million-a-day lottery rewarding swing-state residents who register to vote and sign a conservative petition.

Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who writes a blog on election-law issues and is considered a leading authority, called the PAC’s lottery “clearly illegal vote buying” — citing federal statute that makes it unlawful to offer money to voters as an inducement to register, with penalties up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Hasen and others allege that similar activities, including Musk’s offer to pay $100 for referrals for registered voters to sign the same petition, fall into a legal grey area. With Election Day just two weeks away, a group of Republican former lawmakers and aides, including some who worked in the Justice Department, have delivered letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry pleading for an investigation. They wrote: “We are aware of nothing like this in modern political history.”

Neither am I. And it’s far from the only behavior by the billionaire that — while probably not unlawful under America’s notoriously watered-down election laws — looks downright sleazy. Talking Points Memo has reported that a Musk-funded PAC is microtargeting voters to tell Arab Americans that Kamala Harris is anti-Muslim and tell Jewish voters that she is anti-Israel, and that a different “dark money” group funded by Musk is sending texts and creating websites that seem to be impersonating the Harris campaign. These are serious allegations — yet history suggests nothing will come of them.

The top U.S. agency for enforcing key campaign laws, the Federal Election Commission, is divided along partisan lines and has what its many critics call “a record of nonenforcement.” Investigations of even the most serious allegations take months if not years, and the rare penalties typically come long after Election Day and often amount to a slap on the wrist. Musk, who didn’t become the world’s richest man by playing nice, surely knows this. The biggest issue in the 2024 election is the ease with which America’s billionaires could buy it, and no one is doing a gosh-darn thing about it.

Barack Obama is back in the news these days, as a chief surrogate for Kamala Harris and a leading voice arguing that American democracy is on the line in 14 days. That’s good, but Obama’s eight-year presidency should be remembered as a lot more complicated. On this day 11 years ago, I voiced frustration that early hiccups in the Obamacare website were dominating the national conversion when no one was talking about the human-rights abuses of America’s drone warfare. I wrote: “Now, this is a policy fiasco, not only flouting international law but even counter-productive to American interests — creating hatred and distrust so intense that many experts believe that out-of-control drone warfare is creating more new enemies than the old ones it kills off. But the deep and abiding failure of this Obama administration policy is a human one, not a technological issue.” Read the rest and see if you agree: “U.S. government tech: Lousy at health care, great at flying death robots.”

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