UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump worked a 30-minute shift in a McDonald's kitchen in Buck County, Pennsylvania. This seemingly mundane publicity stunt at a McDonald's franchise reveals a complex narrative of class dynamics, political performance, and the ongoing struggle to connect with America's working class. This performative labor, which I define for the purposes of this essay as any activity which generates the appearance of busyness and production rather than true labor, becomes a microcosm of broader social tensions. This thus exposes the intricate ways political candidates negotiate their relationship with working-class identity and experience. This analysis seeks to unpack these social tensions between the American proletariat and U.S political entities by examining Trump's McDonald's shift alongside both Harris’ and Trump’s socioeconomic and political backgrounds using Marx and Engels’ ideas of worker alienation of labor and class consciousness.