Nobody is better than Donald Trump at changing the subject. Much like the weather in New England, if you don’t like what people are saying about Trump now, just wait five minutes.
Sure enough, he moved on from calling Pope Leo XIV “weak on crime” and digitally turning into Jesus over the weekend by reaching back to that time he (rather successfully) cosplayed as a McDonald’s worker. In a fresh PR stunt designed to make him look somewhat normal while celebrating flagship policy, the president had McDonalds “delivered” to the White House by a DoorDasher.
Unfortunately for Trump, changing the subject from his spat straight out of the Middle Ages might be the only thing this latest stunt accomplished. Instead of getting people talking about his “No Tax on Tips” policy, though, it got people talking about how the stunt was a flop. In other words, it went about as well as anything else Trump has done lately.
Straining credulity
As a tee-up for Tax Week, the White House arranged for a DoorDasher to participate in the fantasy that the Secret Service routinely allows random people to hand-deliver lunch to the president. The driver, Sharon Simmons, was meant to express her gratitude to Trump on behalf of all service workers, as cameras snapped pics of the president being folksy.
It did not exactly go as planned.
The first thing that went wrong was that the staginess itself took center stage. Upon opening the exterior door and seeing a scrum of cameras, Trump joked, “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” Further highlighting the aura of unreality, he seemed to have an entire dossier about the woman committed to memory.
“So, the reason for this is the fact that I heard you picked up an extra $11,000 because the tax bill was so big,” he prompted, citing a statistically improbable amount of savings that Simmons herself would later refute.
The stilted conversation that followed centered around the various personal and financial hardships she has recently endured, which the extra cash helped ameliorate. Trump couldn’t resist turning the conversation political, however, awkwardly coaxing from Simmons the fact that she voted for him, and soliciting her opinion about trans women in sports. (“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons replied.)
The stunt only went from mild failure to fiasco, though, as observers began dissecting it online.
Backfiring spectacularly
Aside from the uncanny staged nature of the event, several eagle-eyed social media users quickly seized on Simmons’s familiar look.
It turned out they had seen the Arkansas resident star in a reel shared by Rep. Jason Smith on Facebook recently, and during a Ways and Means Committee field hearing in Las Vegas last July. In both instances, Simmons had gushed about the ways Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would greatly benefit people such as herself.
It’s one thing for a Trump PR stunt to come off as stage-managed and forced; it’s another for it to feature an apparent professional MAGA plant. Not only does her inclusion call into question just how many plants might be deployed in other capacities to help advance Trump’s agenda, but it also makes Trump’s previous accusations of inorganic protest against him look like mere projection.
Making matters worse, the head of Public Affairs at Door Dash quickly began spiraling when he attempted to tamp down the backlash to the event. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Julian Crowley disputed on X that there was anything fishy about a woman from Arkansas appearing in a pro-Trump capacity at events in Washington DC and Las Vegas a year apart. (“You need to touch grass,” he wrote at the end of one tweet explaining how this everyday American obviously lived in Nevada last year, before moving to Arkansas more recently.) Crowley’s crashout soon became a story unto itself, beyond underlining the failure of Trump’s stunt.
Adding fuel to the fire, so to speak, the stunt drew further glaring attention to fast-rising fuel costs since the war in Iran began. The high cost of gas has been a major issue for delivery drivers over the past six weeks, complicating the White House’s intended economic messaging.
Sure, Trump may have tipped Simmons $100, but if he really wanted to do something for drivers, he might have increased the IRS mileage deduction rate, as DoorDashers are begging for and as Senator Ruben Gallego has been agitating for throughout the war.
Diminishing returns
As a former reality TV star, Trump often seems to think in reality TV terms. His publicity stunts tend to have a theatrical quality but they are also episodic in nature—”This week, on a very special Trump, our hero hosts a Tesla informercial on the White House lawn.”
The platonic ideal of a Trump stunt is probably his McDonald’s visit in late 2024. It began as glib commentary about then-opponent Kamala Harris’s claim of working at Mickey D’s in her teens, but it bloomed into something way more effective. Like all his most successful publicity stunts, that one dominated media attention, shored up his base, infuriated his detractors, shifted social media conversation, and launched countless memes. He even got new merch out of it.
Monday’s doomed DoorDash stunt, though, only shows how far Trump has fallen in the 18 months or so since the 2024 election.
The disastrous PR stunt came amid multiple personnel shakeups in his cabinet, a public souring on his immigration approach after the chaos in Minneapolis, bipartisan calls for the 25th amendment due to his erratic nuclear threats against Iran, not to mention the perpetually lingering Epstein files, which are always a slow news day away from returning to the forefront of discourse.
Trump’s popularity is now in freefall, and the failed DoorDash extravaganza is just the latest example. It was meant to give him an easy win, like his visit to McDonald’s; instead, the inept execution has eclipsed the stunt itself, and only extended the long streak of recent losses.
Or to put it in reality TV terms, the Trump show appears to be on the bubble.