Old Donald, a burger king, to fry Kamala over McDonalds

Famously a burger king, old Donald Trump will be trolling Kamala Harris this weekend by trying his hand at making french fries at the ubiquitous fast food chain McDonald's .

Trump himself has said -- while discrediting Harris' claim that she worked at a McDonald's -- that he intends to get behind the fry cooker one of these days, ostensibly to make a point. It now appears, as per campaign leaks, that he will trigger a war of the fries – or lies – on Sunday at a McDonald's outlet in Pennsylvania, a battleground state.

The MAGA supremo has repeatedly questioned Harris' assertion that she worked at a McDonald's in Alameda, California, during the summer of 1983. The avowal is aimed at buttressing her middle class credentials and drawing a contrast with Trump, a wealthy real estate tycoon from New York City who inherited a fortune from his father and is largely labor averse.

"Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people, and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs,' Harris said in a MSNBC TV interview last month, elaborating on what the experience means for her.

While McDonald’s is a metaphor for commonplace pervasiveness and unhealthy diet for food fetishists, working summer jobs in such fast food chains is a rite of passage for many American youth . According to McDonald’s 1-in-8 initiative, 13.7% of Americans (one in eight) have worked at one of its outlets at some point in their lives.

Not Trump, who is a frequent McDonald's eater, but has never worked there. Perhaps it was the kinship he feared Harris would strike with the nearly 800,000 McDonald's employees in its 13,000 outlets across the US, but he has relentlessly and peevishly questioned her claim of working there, going to the extent of demanding proof.

Absent that, Trump will jump in behind the frying pan at a chain he so visibly loves that it shows on him. A 2017 book "Let Trump Be Trump" by two former aides disclosed that a typical Trump order from McDonald's was "two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted" -- fare one nutritionist calculated at 2,430 calories and 111 grams of fat for a single meal. Small wonder that when he tipped 243 lbs and came in with a body mass index of 30.4 in 2019, he was considered officially obese.

Trump's McLove though continues to this day and apparently he's spreading it across his campaign: According to a recent media report, between January 2023 and September 20, 2024, the Trump campaign spent $31,000 at McDonald’s, which was 86 percent of all candidates’ spending at the chain in that time frame

Such McLove also reveals itself in Trump's MAGA base. The ten most unhealthy states in America – as per Center for Disease Control guidelines – are all red Republican states: West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana

Conversely, the ten states with the healthiest populations all vote Democratic: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Hawaii, California, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Colorado, and Vermont.

Chidananand Rajdhatta is US correspondent for TOI