Trump visited a Bucks County McDonald’s to cook some french fries and work the drive-thru

Donald J. Trump has entered his fry cook phase.

After playing DJ for more than 30 minutes last week before a confused audience in Montgomery County, then waxing nostalgic about a dead golfer’s “unbelievable” penis outside Pittsburgh on Saturday, the 78-year-old former president returned to the Philadelphia suburbs Sunday afternoon to make french fries at McDonald’s.

Trump’s trip to the Golden Arches — 16 days before the election — appeared rooted in his strongly held belief that Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, is not a former employee of the fast-food chain.

Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee who turned 60 on Sunday, has said she once held a summer job at a McDonald’s while in college.

Trump, the Republican nominee, is convinced she made it up. He apparently sees it as a critical issue in the campaign.

“I’m having a lot of fun here,” Trump said Sunday afternoon from the drive-thru window of the McDonald’s on Street Road in Feasterville, Bucks County, as he served food to a few select customers who sat in their cars for more than an hour.

The restaurant was closed to the public during the event.

Thousands of Trump supporters lined Street Road hours before his scheduled arrival, stretching almost to the Taco Bell. They sang “God Bless America” and blasted Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and the Doors’ “L.A. Woman” from speakers. Vehicles honked and revved their engines in support. Harris supporters were booed or met with obscenities

“Trump will protect America,” said Ron Krier, 62, an insurance broker from Upper Southampton who wore a T-shirt depicting Trump as Superman. “He’ll keep the boys out of girls’ sports and protect our borders.”

But Trump, whose increasingly erratic behavior has now begun to worry even his Republican allies, has remained fixated on the McDonald’s issue as polls remain extremely close in the final days of the presidential campaign.

That has generated a slew of french fry-related headlines in recent weeks:

“I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump told reporters during an impromptu news conference from the drive-thru window. He dodged questions about whether he’d support raising the minimum wage.

The visit drew criticism from Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers Union, who called Trump a “scab” at a rally with labor union SEIU in Philadelphia on Sunday.

”You know today … Donald Trump, a 78-year-old who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, was putting on a show, playing dress-up at McDonald’s to act like he is one of us,” Fain said. “Kamala Harris doesn’t have to put on a show because she’s worn the uniform. She is one of us. She worked her way up through the ranks, and she had to work to make a living, just like the rest of us do.”

Last month, at a campaign stop in Indiana, Pa., Trump accused Harris, without offering evidence, of lying about working at McDonald’s and said he wanted to work as a fry cook to “see how it is.” Harris has spoken about her college job there to contrast her middle-class upbringing with Trump’s privileged early years and career start working for his father’s real estate firm.

Trump kept it going on Fox News on Friday, saying his campaign had investigated Harris’ story.

“We checked it out,” he said. “Unless somebody comes up with something. We checked it out. They said she never worked here. She even picked the store. We went to the manager. The manager’s been there forever. ‘You remember her?’ ‘No, she never worked here.’ They know.”

Harris has stood by her assertion.

Trump’s McDonald’s visit followed a Saturday campaign stop at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Western Pennsylvania, where he went off script and started talking about the penis size of the late golf legend, describing him as “all man.”

“When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’ Trump said.

Clips of his remarks had received millions of views by Sunday morning. The Harris campaign called it a “long confused ramble.”

That rally followed what had already been a rocky week for Trump.

On Monday, he’d stopped taking questions at a town hall in Oaks, Montgomery County, instead spending a half hour swaying on stage to music. The next day Trump struggled in a live interview with Bloomberg at the Chicago Economic Club, providing answers to questions that weren’t asked. At a Wednesday town hall hosted by Univision, Trump recast the violent Jan. 6 insurrection as a “day of love” when “nothing” was “done wrong.”

Trump’s recent behavior has raised questions in both parties about his mental state. He has refused calls to release comprehensive medical records.

On Fox News on Friday, Trump responded to a question about his favorite farm animal from a 6-year-old boy in Massachusetts: “I love cows. But if we go with Kamala, you won’t have any cows anymore.” That led to more head-scratching headlines, such as: “Trump tells child there will be no cows under Harris.”

It was unclear what Trump was referring to. Harris has not proposed eliminating cows from farms.

While the weeks-long storyline about McDonald’s is certainly bizarre for a presidential campaign, Trump’s selection of the chain’s Feasterville restaurant on Sunday is not.

Bucks County is a nearly evenly divided county known for vote splitting and politically moderate voters, and Pennsylvania is a critical swing state that both candidates see as an important part of their path to victory.

Trump won Pennsylvania by a little less than one percentage point in 2016, and President Joe Biden won by a little more than one percentage point in 2020. The state carries 19 electoral votes, the most out of all the swing states. Harris and Trump and their surrogates have been crisscrossing the state during the final stretch of the election, underscoring its importance.

“As a small, independent business owner, it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” Derek Giacomantonio, owner of the McDonald’s on Street Road, said in a statement. “That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”

Another reason why a last-minute campaign trip to McDonald’s is not surprising for Trump: He simply loves the food.

Trump’s go-to order is two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake, according to a former campaign manager. But Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner dialed it back a bit, saying in his memoir that Trump’s preferred order is: “McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake.”

Last week, Donald Trump Jr. bragged on Fox News that his father “knows the McDonald’s menu much better” than Harris.

Staff writers Julia Terruso and Aliya Schneider contributed to this article.