LANCASTER, Pa. — Donald Trump spent one of the final weekends before the election in a battleground-state swing that took him to a McDonald’s, a convention center, and a football game.
After landing in Philadelphia Sunday afternoon, Trump stopped at a suburban McDonald’s to engage in a highly choreographed stint at the fry station, hosted a freewheeling but ultimately uneventful town hall, and planned to end the day at a Pittsburgh Steelers game.
“Fifteen days until we get to be great again,” Trump said during the town hall at the Lancaster Convention Center, where the GOP nominee took pre-screened questions from supporters in a forum moderated by conservative podcast host Sage Steele.
Trump is keeping a packed schedule with just over two weeks until the election, despite the suggestion from his campaign that Trump had backed out of an interview with the Black-oriented media outlet The Shade Room because he’s suffering from exhaustion.
Unlike Trump’s last town hall in the state, Trump didn’t dance or play music. And unlike his appearance on the other side of the state Saturday, he didn’t tell any stories about the genitalia of deceased, legendary golfers. He mostly stuck to complaining about crime, immigration, and Kamala Harris. “I have no cognitive — she may have a cognitive problem,” Trump said of Harris, who has suggested the 78-year-old Trump’s cognitive abilities are slipping.
Trump also touted his pie-in-the-sky proposals to exempt taxes on overtime, make car loan interest tax deductible, and reduce household energy costs by half — with no specifics on how he might achieve those policies.
“Frack, frack, frack — like a duck,” Trump said at one point, imitating a duck while discussing the process for extracting energy from deep rock formations.
The audience booed Harris after Trump noted it was her 60th birthday, which Harris spent campaigning today in Georgia. “I believe that Joe Biden likes me more than he likes Kamala Harris,” Trump said.
Mostly, the event was classic Trump. The former president pointed out a guy in the front row dressed in a brick-wall-pattered suit to represent the wall at the southern border — “Mr. Wall,” Trump called him. Halfway through, Trump appeared to get restless with the Q&A format, stopping for a minute to bring local lawmakers to the stage, something he normally does at rallies.
He took a question on Medicare and Social Security from a retired union worker with a long beard and Carhartt overalls. Trump said he liked the overalls. “Doesn’t he look handsome? He’s a much better-looking guy than I am,” said the former president, who also called the moderator “beautiful” and then complained that you can’t call women beautiful anymore if you’re a politician.
But the part of the day that really made headlines for Trump was his stop before Lancaster in suburban Philadelphia, where he worked the fryer in a McDonald’s apron and handed out orders to supporters through the drive-thru window.
Trump made that particular stop to antagonize Harris, who has made her brief time working the fry station and the cashier at McDonald’s as a college student a key aspect of her early biography. Republicans claim, without evidence, that Harris is lying about her fast-food job, with Trump quipping today that he worked the fryer for 15 minutes longer than Harris.
Trump corrected the record when Steele said he flipped burgers. “Mostly fries,” Trump said. He also called the process “beautiful.”
The former president said he was told he did not even have to make that particular stop, but insisted he wanted to. “They said, you can avoid this. Can you avoid this. Can you imagine that? I said, who’s going to tell these people? Hey, maybe we can make this more exciting than the McDonald’s stuff. How about that? There’s no way,” Trump said.
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Trump’s experience at the fry station, however, did not cause him to have more empathy for workers who make the $7.50/hour federal minimum wage. Asked if he supported raising the minimum wage while he stood in the drive-thru window, Trump pointedly dodged the question.
“Well, I think this: These people work hard. They’re great. And I just saw something – a process that’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.” (Harris supports raising the minimum wage, though her campaign has declined to name a specific dollar amount.)
Steele, greeting Trump on stage, applauded him for having a packed day, in what is normally the busiest stretch of the campaign: “What a day. You start off at a McDonald’s, you come to a town hall, then you end with Sunday night football. That man has some energy.”