Former President Donald Trump made French fries at a McDonald’s in Feasterville, Pennsylvania over the weekend, Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, supporters of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, some in weird costumes, gathered along a roadside and screamed at one another.
On Sunday afternoon, former President Donald Trump dropped by a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He had cooked up a stunt to troll Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has talked about having worked at McDonald’s one summer during college. Inside the restaurant, Trump wore an apron and dropped french fries into a vat of gurgling oil. Across the street, something much unhealthier was bubbling up.
A few hundred Trump supporters were lining the shoulder of the road and holding a tailgate party in the parking lot of a strip mall right where Philadelphia ends and the suburbs begin. Another group of locals – maybe 50 people – had turned up to protest Trump’s visit. People on the two sides spent the sunny autumn afternoon screaming into one another’s faces while filming the skirmishes on their iPhones.
The parking lot throbbed with hatred, fear and neighbour’s suspicion of neighbour. It became a microcosm of this year’s election, vicious and absurd. There was shouting about Project 2025 and the January 6 riot. Transgender youth and vaccines. Tariffs and abortion. Fascism and communism. Trump’s supporters wore T-shirts that said “I’m voting for the convicted felon”. The other side yelled, “Lock him up”. One person wore an orange prison jumpsuit and a mask of Trump’s face.
This is what the mood is like in a swing state, 16 days before an election. Sixteen days before this election. Nearly a decade into the Trump-era of politics, the language is apocalyptic. Social media has supercharged the crude negativity.
Both campaigns are spending wildly here. You can barely turn on the television or scroll on your phone without seeing a nasty advertisement. Many ordinarily nice people seem to have gone a little mad. They’re wearing political merchandise to dive bars and posting videos of themselves fighting over yard signs. Every day, November 5 creeps a little closer, and the partisan tinnitus rings a little louder.
Michael Mazzoni, a 57-year-old man who said he lives in the neighbourhood and works in pharmaceuticals, held a sign supporting Harris. It read: “WEIRD. Stop bullies and criminals. Vote for Freedom.” He puffed on a cigar and smiled while a few Trump supporters flipped him off. “Just making sure our message gets heard,” he said when asked why he had chosen to spend his Sunday in this Trump-adjacent manner. “The Trump message is always louder, crazier,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s the majority.”
Lynda Mintz, a 77-year-old retiree from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, who said she was a volunteer for the Harris campaign, nodded. On her head was a hat that read “DUMP TRUMP”. “Do you remember what they used to call the silent majority?” she asked. “I kind of think that’s the Democrats now.” A moment later, a truck towing a speedboat painted with the letters T-R-U-M-P drove by. The former President’s supporters erupted as the driver laid on the horn. A Democrat held up a sign aloft that read “HONK IF UR DUMB AF”.
A passing Lexus slowed as it reached the besieged group of Democrats. The passenger-side window rolled down and out popped a sign with a picture of a smiling Harris and this caption: “Say it to my face!” The Democrats cried out in delight while the Trump supporters shouted obscenities at the car.
Trump was there to troll. It was remarkable how his presence inspired so much troll-like behaviour from everybody else in the vicinity.
“Unfortunately, Trump, who is basically an entertainer, has riled up some ugly emotions in the American psyche,” said Steve Cickay, a 69-year-old Democrat from Newtown, Pennsylvania, who worked for various federal agencies and once ran for state office.
Even though he was there, in the parking lot, engaging in street theatre in which precisely zero minds would be changed, Cickay insisted that liberals were just wired differently from the type of person who would support Trump. “A lot of us Democrats, we write letters to the editor,” he said, laughing. “We knock on doors. We talk to our neighbours civilly. We don’t like going to rallies.” He lowered his voice just a little and said, “On the Trump side, you see people that are, frankly, weird.” He waved his hand in the direction of a pale man traipsing by in nothing but a star-spangled Speedo.
“I’m very concerned about the state of our democracy,” Cickay said. Behind him, a man and a woman were in each other’s faces, arguing about gerrymandering.
Apropos of seemingly nothing, a woman in a pink hat cupped a hand to her mouth and screamed, “E. Jean Carroll lied!” – a reference to the case in which Trump was found liable for sexually abusing a journalist. A man in a Harris/Walz T-shirt yelled “Fascists!” at some Trump supporters. “Paedophile!” one shot back.
“I’m here because I find Trump unpatriotic, un-American and downright treasonous,” said Nicole Paul, a 57-year-old veterinarian from Southampton, Pennsylvania. She said she worried a lot about what might happen even if Trump lost the election. She glanced around at her neighbours. “I feel like Jan. 6 was maybe a trial run,” she said, “and now they’re a lot more organised – and a lot angrier.” Just then, a brawny man walked by and yelled “Trump 2024″ inches from her face.
The people of Bucks County were at one another’s throats.
An older woman ripped a Trump flag right out of someone’s hand and began to kick and swing. “She’s wiggin’ out!” one man yelled excitedly. The woman was put in handcuffs and frog-marched toward a police van across the street. “They’re the party of hate,” said one Trump supporter, Stephanie Inselberg, 49, who was taking in this scene while eating a chicken wrap from Arby’s. “They hate anyone who does not agree with them,” she added. She seemed to genuinely feel that way.
A moment later, she began fighting with a Harris supporter. Evidently, they were from the same town. “You’re what’s wrong with Bensalem,” said one. “No,” said the other, “you’re what’s wrong with Bensalem!”
The parking lot continued to whip itself into a partisan frenzy while Trump hammed it up inside the McDonald’s. His aides filmed him as he toddled around the establishment, working the fryer. At one point, he stuck his head out of the drive-through window and chirped: “I’m having a lot of fun here, everybody!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shawn McCreesh
Photographs by: Doug Mills
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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