The defining moment of the 2024 presidential campaign, it can be argued, came almost exactly two years ago, on Sunday, Oct. 20, when then-former President Donald Trump traded his suit coat for a yellow apron and worked the fry station and the drive-thru window at a McDonald’s.
His staff picked a propitious location in the battleground state of Pennsylvania: lower Bucks County, just south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and about a mile west of U.S. 1, suburban turf settled a generation or two ago by the sons and daughters of blue-collar ethnic communities in northeast Philadelphia.
Trump lost Bucks County to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. In 2024, he carried it over Kamala Harris by 291 votes out of 402,349 cast.
The appearance at McDonald’s was prompted by Trump’s scoffing at Harris’s claims, made without documentation, that she had worked at McDonald’s while in college. But more than that, it underlined an argument that had been proving effective for a month in pro-Trump advertising.
Those ads showed Harris, as a candidate in 2019, assuring the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund of her early support for government-paid sex-change surgery for transgender prison inmates. The tagline was “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
The McDonald’s appearance showed the notoriously rich Trump serving ordinary people and acknowledging the seriousness of the work they do. “It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast,” he told reporters.
Trump’s political standing has since suffered because of a sense that, in his second term, he has been serving himself rather than his constituents. There is now a real possibility that his Republican Party will lose Senate and House seats in states and districts he carried by double digits just 16 days after his stint at McDonald’s.
For the economy, as the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker plausibly argues, is not in dreadful shape. The current inflation rate of 3.7% is much lower than the 9% rate under Joe Biden in 2022.
On foreign policy, it’s clear that, in Wall Street Journal analyst Walter Mead’s words, Trump has “given the hawks more influence over Iran policy while catering to restrainer sensibilities on Russia” — probably the opposite of what current public opinion favors. But those policies, at least in the short run, have not produced high casualty levels or perceptible fiscal strain.
Nor is it clear that voters affirmatively favor Democratic policies or place any faith in Democrats’ promises to make things more affordable. The swing against Republicans, however great it turns out to be, seems driven more by an impulse to curb the power and excesses of the Republican president than by any faith in alternative policies. A Gallup poll released Tuesday shows nearly half of respondents saying Democrats are too extreme.
What seems to make voters unhappy, including many who voted for him two years ago, is Trump’s self-indulgence.
On policy, that’s most apparent in his tariffs. Even though there’s no perceptible demand for them in the political marketplace, Trump has gleefully produced a plentiful supply in his second term. His affection for tariffs goes back four or five decades, even as candidates boosting them — John Connally, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan — have foundered.
His juddering increases and decreases in tariffs, starting with his “Liberation Day” just after April Fool’s Day in 2025, have produced few perceptible gains for Americans but have resulted in higher prices. The tariff-raising contest he initiated with Canada has raised rates to 50% and prompted Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers to insist, “Here in Michigan we know that Canada is not our enemy.” Rogers added, “We need to end this tariff war now.”
Trump is on more solid policy ground in his actions against Iran, which has never apologized for seizing American diplomats 47 years ago — a violation of the first rule of international law and the first of multiple acts of war against the United States. He could have made, over time, a persuasive case for action.
Instead, he seems to have acted on the assumption that the powers in Iran would prove as compliant with his demands as Venezuela’s Chavista thugs have been since his lightning abduction and prosecution of dictator Nicolas Maduro. It turns out that Iran’s mullahs and Revolutionary Guard are made of sterner stuff and are located in a more distant and perilous neighborhood.
Also damaging has been the president’s self-indulgence in putting his stamp on Washington. You don’t have to be an aficionado of minimalist decor to find his gilt decorations in the Oval Office off-putting. There’s a plausible case that the White House needs a larger ballroom, and it is already flanked by the much larger and architecturally discordant Treasury and old State/War/Navy buildings.
You could complain that a hostile press has lavished unfavorable coverage on Trump’s plans for a triumphal arch, his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool repainting, and his efforts to affix his name to the Kennedy Center. All minor stuff, you may object.
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But taken together with the higher prices attributable to high tariffs and the Middle East conflict, these projects have clearly damaged the standing of the president and his party more than anything in Trump’s first term. Voters see those higher prices every day at the gasoline and diesel pumps, and Trump’s job approval moves inversely to gas prices.
It’s still possible for Republicans to argue that Democrats are “for they/them.” But it’s getting harder to persuade voters that “President Trump is for you.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
