Donald Trump’s famous campaign slogan collided with his love of fast food as the former president promised to make McDonald’s ice cream machines “work great again.”
The former president took to his Truth Social platform on Saturday night with a post that played off a popular meme that the franchise’s desert-making equipment is frequently out of commission.
“WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” Trump declared.
The post also featured an image of a smiling President Joe Biden wearing a MAGA hat and holding a large ice cream cone.
The post was well received, garnering more than 150,000 likes on X within an hour.
One user replied: “Bro you already had my vote but now I’m gonna take a few people with me to vote just because of this post.”
WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/jqdyMpgnLF
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2024
Others were less enthused, with another user replying: “Kamala is literally gonna start shaking in fear if she reads this.”
The post comes as Trump continues to ride high on his recent campaign stunt of pretending to work behind the fry station at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania. He has consistently referred to the staged event at his rallies since.
The former president — a longtime McDonald’s customer who even fed college football players food from the restaurant at the White House in 2019 — spent roughly 30 minutes making French fries and greeting customers at a drive-thru window in an attempt to show up Kamala Harris, who Trump claims without evidence is lying about working at a McDonald’s restaurant while in college.
Harris worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, according to Harris and her campaign.
“Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches,” the company sent in a message to employees after Trump’s campaign stunt. “While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.”
At his Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, Trump proudly repeated his claim that the stunt had been so successful that he had been contacted by the head of Google — Sundar Pichai — who had congratulated him on his “monster” event.
"I actually got a call from Sundar ... the head of Google and he said, ‘sir, I just want to tell you what you did with McDonald’s was one of the single biggest events we’ve ever had at Google,’” he told the crowd.
The former president also baselessly claimed that 29,000 supporters surrounded the restaurant while he cooked, telling crowds in Las Vegas: "We weren’t sure if we were able to get out.”
Social media users were quick to point out that although large crowds did line the surrounding streets of the Feasterville-Trevose restaurant, the Republican nominee’s numbers appeared to be inflated.
“For context around this obvious lie, that McDonald’s is in Feasterville-Trevose, PA which has a total population of 24,657,” one person said on X.
Trump’s love of the Golden Arches is well documented, with his son Donald Jr recently claiming — in an unusual flex — that his father knew the McDonald’s menu better than Harris did.
However, despite Trump’s positivity over the event, the stunt may have been unfortunately timed, with reports of a severe E coli outbreak linked to the chain’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers.
According to the food safety alert issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on October 22, one person died and 49 people were left sick across 10 different states as a result of the outbreak.
