Donald Trump hands out fries and holds drive-thru news conference at McDonald’s
As reporters and aides watched, an employee showed Mr Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in oil, salt the fries and put them into boxes using a scoop.
Republican US presidential nominee Donald Trump handed out fries at a McDonald’s on Sunday before staging an impromptu news conference, answering questions through the drive-thru window.
As reporters and aides watched, an employee showed Mr Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in oil, salt the fries and put them into boxes using a scoop.
Mr Trump, a well-known fan of fast food and a notorious germophobe, expressed amazement that he did not have to touch the fries with his hands.
“It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast,” Mr Trump said with a grin, putting away his suit jacket and wearing an apron over his shirt and tie.
A large crowd lined the street outside the restaurant in Pennsylvania. Later he was attending an evening rally before catching the Pittsburgh Steelers home game against the New York Jets.
After serving bags of takeaway to people in the drive-thru lane, Mr Trump leaned out of the window, still wearing the apron, to take questions from the media outside.
The former president, who has constantly promoted falsehoods about his 2020 election loss, said he would respect the results of next month’s vote “if it’s a fair election”.
Mr Trump did not directly answer a question about whether he might support increased minimum wages after seeing McDonald’s employees in action but said: “These people work hard. They’re great.”
He added that “I just saw something, a process that’s beautiful.”
When aides finally urged him to wrap things up so he could hit the road to his next event, Mr Trump said: “Wasn’t that a strange place to do a news conference?”
Mr Trump said the vice president has “lied about working” there, but offered no evidence for claiming that.
In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president rejected Mr Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
