The Best Take On Trump's McDonald's Visit

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala" at McDonald's 🤣 pic.twitter.com/RMeivIPPd0

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024

From Phil Boas at the Arizona Republic:

This was supposed to be “Senile Sunday,” the day Harris and her surrogates made the case that Donald Trump is too old and mentally infirm to be president. They made the point repeatedly on the Sunday shows.

Kamala Harris even launched the day with an ad and this tweet:

“Donald Trump is exhausted, unstable, and unfit to be President of the United States.”

Other surrogates and campaign people picked up the theme and piled on.

Then the fry chef went to work in Bucks County, Pa.

The cook who was too old, too tired and too senile to be president took the entire contents of the freezer bag labeled “Democratic Party” and emptied it into his metal basket.

Then he deep fried it in hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Boas hints at the bigger context:

The whole thing was deliciously insane, bizarre in the way that America does bizarre.

It’s what the Democrats have never understood about Trump or the country.

America is weird.

And if you don’t understand what Trump did at McDonald’s and that it was a breakthrough in this campaign, then you don’t understand Trump or the country.

Corporate media is deeply puzzled that Trump isn't following the game plan they think he should at the end of the campaoign. Why on earth is he going to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden?

Donald Trump is reportedly fixated on hosting a rally at New York City’s famous Madison Square Garden arena, despite most political experts believing the Empire State and even Trump’s hometown of New York City are squarely in the blue column for 2024.

“I’m gonna fill the Garden,” he reportedly boased in recent days to a confidant, who spoke anonymously to The Bulwark.

The Trump ally added that the Republican “has just been obsessed with this for at least a year. This is his campaign. So it’s happening.”

The story is clearly convinced that this is yet another sign that he's unstable and unhinged, but it's doing its best to come up with charitable explanations:

One could simply be for hometown pride.

Trump, despite changing his legal residency to Florida in 2020, was born in New York City, and still derives part of his political appeal from his (often exaggerated) career as a New York real estate developer.

Another might be a combination of that pride plus the former president’s fondness for doing things people say he can’t.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden,” Trump said with evident glee last week at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “We’re going to make a play for New York.”

Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardian, for his part, is not looking for harmless explanations:

Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20 February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.

. . . Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure, rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly, but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself.

In other words, he's unstable and unhinged. The thinking seems to be that the race is razor-thin, much too close to call, and Trump should be focusing on certain counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, because that's what Kamala's doing. Renting Madison Square Garden is at best chasing a chimera, but much more likely, it's indulging grandiose Hitlerian delusions. But Blumenthal is clearly afraid that delusional or not, Trump might actually realize his nefarious vision:

Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage.

. . . In 2019, a seven-minute documentary about the Nazi rally of 1939, A Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. To promote it, a 30-second TV ad was produced with the tagline: “It Can Happen Here.” The line was a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about a populist demagogue defeating FDR and imposing a fascist regime.

I think there's actually a deep understanding, although coupled with deep anger, jealousy, and resentment, at Trump's success in this year's campaign. People like Blumenethal understand quite well Trump's strategy at McDonald's and Madison Square Garden -- he's playing for the win. He's outperforming both his 2016 and 2020 record, after all. I don't think this is going to be close.