Donald McDonald | Chris Piascik / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A #1 with a large fry, made and served by the forty-fifth president of the United States: Donald Trump was working a drive-through at a McDonald’s last weekend in Pennsylvania. He salted fries and greeted customers, a stunt meant to mock Kamala Harris and her repeated claim to have worked at the fast-food establishment over 40 years ago—a claim many of Trump’s supporters believe to be a lie, concocted to make her more “relatable” in the eyes of ordinary middle-class voters.
Pundits from the center and left denounced the carefully staged photo op as fake, awkward, and weird. Vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz accused Trump of “pander[ing] and disrespect[ing] McDonald’s employees by standing there in your red tie and tak[ing] a picture.” A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign doubled down, linking the event to Trump’s long history of “exploiting working people for his own personal gain.”
We’ve heard similar criticisms of Trump’s frequently outrageous conduct for eight years now. What makes the McDonald’s event interesting, though, is the dramatic shift in the style of Trump’s theatrical gestures.
Trump has always been a populist—that is, Trump has always sought political authority via a constructed identification with “the people” against “the elite.” That identificatory work happens, in part, through Trump’s stylized political performances: he walks and talks like “the people.” He eats junk food, swears, and harasses women. He is in this sense identical with other far-right populists, like Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, or Viktor Orbán.
But Trump is also a classically “charismatic” leader, as Max Weber understood the term. He stands apart, he’s different, he’s a leader who appears to possess “special gifts of body and mind.” He shows his unique capacity to inspire people through his command at large rallies. He uniquely defines the boundaries of “the people” through policies like the so-called Muslim ban and the promise to build a wall at America’s border with Mexico. This is a politician that promises to demolish the “steel shell” forged by the modern administrative state and its bureaucratic officiants. In his own way, Trump combines two of Weber’s favorite forms of charisma: the “warlord,” who leads his followers into battle, and the “prophet,” who proclaims the will of God.
Recently, sociologist Julia Sonnevend has suggested that we supplement Weber’s concept of charisma with a fresh focus on “charm” as a modern tool of political domination. Unlike charisma, with its stress on shock and awe and raw force, charm requires authenticity, relatability, and closeness. Where the politicians of old bellowed from the podium, twenty-first century leaders like Jacinda Ardern hop on Facebook Live for “quick chats.” Think here of Viktor Orbán’s family photoshoots, Kim Jong Un’s selfies, Mohammad Javad Zarif’s smiles, and Tim Walz’s football stories. American pundits sometimes talk of “getting a beer” with a politician—that is, imagining a human-to-human interaction with a politician in which relatability, not reverence, is primary.
Trump is usually charismatic, rather than charming. He maintains a classically Weberian separation from his followers via masculine performances. His “breaks from the routine” and “de-maskings”—Sonnevend’s terms—don’t bring him down to the level of his followers. They are, instead, bombastic and excessive ruptures that could only be carried out by an “exceptional” leader, self-styled as the “only person” who can fix a rigged system. He doesn’t hug people, he hugs the American flag. He greets other world leaders as fellow autocrats, not as friends. Trump isn’t someone you get a beer with; he’s someone you watch on the TV at the bar with your buddies.
The visit to McDonald’s marked a striking shift in Trump’s approach. He presented himself as someone doing the kind of job that ordinary, working-class Americans do every day, the kind of menial service job he had never needed to do while growing up as the pampered son of a real estate tycoon.
Trump hammed up the irony, telling his first customer (as the cameras rolled), “This isn’t a normal situation, is it?” By working the fry station and handing out orders to customers, Trump momentarily inhabited the persona of a working-class American, constructing a relationship of relatability with Pennsylvania voters. He looked people in their eyes and smiled at them. These were hollow gestures—the point was that a conscious attempt was made at appearing relatable.
“You made it possible for ordinary people like us to meet you,” one customer gushed. Another felt touched: “It was like meeting a friend!” This is a very different image than Trump the executive, whether on The Apprentice or in the Oval Office, bellowing, “You’re fired!”
Trump struck a similar pose, a few hours later, at a barbershop in Queens. Speaking to a roomful of Latino men, he said,
You guys are the same as me, it’s the same stuff, we were born the same way. I grew up in Queens and all that. I had a great father—I had a father who was a great guy. He was tough but he was good—big heart. Big, big heart. And he was a construction guy—pretty much—and a real estate guy. And I learned a lot from him and he was great. But—I know you people so well without knowing you, I know you so well. When I walked out here, I said this is home territory, and I really appreciate it.
Trump is here trying to merge with his “people” via identification. He grew up in the same borough, he’s a neighbor and a friend. This is the kind of rapport that charm facilitates, in ways that the strictly charismatic leader cannot.
At the same time, Trump, in his charm offensive, managed both to mock Kamala Harris, and her ongoing efforts to make herself relatable and charming, and to reinforce his charismatic status as a man apart, a prophet and a born leader.
As one drive-through customer said to Fox News, “He’s a very charismatic person and he’s very relatable.” That same customer elaborated on the effects of Trump’s charm: “I’m not gonna wash my hands for the next few days.”
This is not how we speak of friends. It’s how we speak of religious figures.
