Former President Trump at the fry cooker.
Photo: Doug Mills/AP Photo
A scion of wealth, Donald Trump presumably has no idea how to work a cash register or mop a restaurant floor. Honest labor eludes him both in practice and as a general concept. So it’s apt that when he strapped on an apron and worked the fry station at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, it wasn’t to demonstrate solidarity with fast-food workers but to score points on a political opponent. Vice-President Kamala Harris has said she worked at the burger chain during her college years. McDonald’s has said it has no record of her employment, which isn’t much of a surprise given the brevity of her time there and how long ago she said it occurred; nevertheless, Trump claims she isn’t telling the truth. “Now I’ve worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” he said on Sunday before calling Harris “Lyin’ Kamala.”
Trump was never going to learn much about working-class life from his McDonald’s stint. His campaign had closed the location to the public for his appearance, and his “customers” had been screened by the Secret Service. Despite this, Trump could have at least expressed support for raising the federal minimum wage, a long-standing worker demand, when asked. Instead he punted. “Well, I think this: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, the process. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see,” he said. “These are great franchises, they produce a lot of jobs.” When CNN asked his campaign the same question, it shared a statement from a spokesperson, who attacked Harris for “lowering real wages and raising prices via reckless spending.”
“Not only will President Trump restore the booming economic climate of his first term, but he will eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay and stand up to Communist China’s efforts to hurt American workers,” the spokesperson added. “Working families overwhelmingly support President Trump because only he will Make America Wealthy, Strong, and Great Again.” That’s a long and uniquely Trumpian non-response, but the implications for workers are clear enough: He won’t back a federal minimum-wage increase.
His refusal to answer a basic question about raising the minimum wage shouldn’t surprise anyone. Though two major unions — the Teamsters and the International Association of Firefighters — raised eyebrows when they announced they would not endorse a candidate for president, leaders of the American labor movement have largely coalesced around Harris in a rejection of Trump’s anti-worker record and rhetoric. Trump’s McDonald’s spectacle was more revealing than he may have intended it to be. His populism is as hollow as his commitment to improving conditions for workers.
Trump does feel solidarity — not with workers but with the wealthy interests that have bankrolled his presidential campaigns. The proof is in his record. As president, he put Eugene Scalia in charge of the Department of Labor largely because of Scalia’s anti-worker bona fides. (Scalia’s predecessor, Alexander Acosta, stepped down due to reports he’d arranged a sweetheart plea deal for sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.) “His longtime agenda has been curtailing government, and at the Labor Department he has overseen the rewriting of dozens of rules that were put in place to protect workers,” Eyal Press wrote of Scalia in The New Yorker in 2020. “As the coronavirus has overrun America, Scalia’s impulse has been to grant companies leeway rather than to demand strict enforcement of safety protocols.” An Obama-era initiative “launched after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, to develop an infectious-disease standard for work sites” was scrapped in the name of “regulatory reform,” Press reported. When COVID started killing workers, OSHA staffers prepared to “reinstate” a “modified” infectious-disease standard. “It went nowhere,” Press added. Instead, a DOL policy memorandum relieved “the vast majority of employers of any duty to keep records about whether employees’ coronavirus infections were ‘work-related.’” Scalia later rescinded the policy after an outcry.
Under Trump, the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board also systematically rolled back workers’ collective bargaining rights. He packed the Supreme Court with justices who have shown a marked hostility to workers and organizing. More recently, Trump has praised Elon Musk for allegedly firing striking workers, which is illegal. “Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told the far-right-wing tech mogul. “You walk in and you just say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone.’ And you are the greatest. You would be very good.”
He’s said, too, that he would rather “get people in” than pay workers overtime. “I know a lot about overtime. I’ve hated to give overtime. I hated it,” he said at a campaign stop. “I get other people — I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.” As Capital and Main reported this month, workers have repeatedly accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay overtime they were owed. Trump’s DOL also “reduced by millions” the workers who would have become eligible for overtime under an Obama-era rule, the news outlet added.
Trump’s record won’t necessarily dissuade workers from voting for him. There’s some polling evidence that Harris is running slightly behind Joe Biden with white and nonwhite working-class voters alike. Despite this, Trump’s McDonald’s stunt may be riskier than it initially appeared. It is, after all, an opportunity for Harris to remind voters that Trump doesn’t exactly have their interests in mind. If he’s re-elected, he’ll likely roll back taxes for the wealthy while assaulting workers’ rights — again.
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