The President’s Big-Mac Feast Was Politically Savvy
How does that line go? All fast food served warm is happy, but every fast-foodstuff consumed after it gets cold is unhappy in its own way?
Regardless: Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s, from Wendy’s, from Burger King, from Domino’s, carefully piled atop silver platters—that were the point: the silver tongs next to the wilting cardboard of the Filet-O-Fish boxes. The containers of dipping sauces, sorted by flavor, stacked cheekily inside silver gravy boats. The recursive faces of Wendy, wrapped around a series of Singles. The French fries, removed from their original packagings and placed, haphazardly, in cardboard cups bearing the seal of the White House. The gilt candelabras lending soft light to the guilty pleasures. A little bit P. T. Barnum, a little bit Hieronymus Bosch, a little bit Beauty and the Beast, had “Be Our Guest” been staged by Willy Wonka and also set in the apocalypse: The whole thing was grinning and a bit grotesque, and that was the point. A portrait of Lincoln gazed down upon the spread and at the man who would claim credit for it, perhaps wondering anew what God hath wrought.
The answer was as evident as the silver-plattered salads: This was a thoroughly Trumpian strain of spectacle, meant to hijack attention and go viral. The president invited members of the press into the State Dining Room on Monday, before the diners were invited in, to take photos and shoot video of the tablescape, rendering an otherwise ordinary White House event (a victorious athletic team, rewarded with a presidential visit) into something remarkable. The feast that ensued was the distillation of some of the president’s dearest visions of America: corporate, mass-produced, homogeneous, delicious, disgusting, lib-triggering, and revolving around the whims of Trump himself. Images of the scene, the president presiding over piles of cardboard-boxed foodstuffs, quickly went viral; there was no way for them not to. Trump bragged about his own role in the procuring of these postmodern loaves and fishes: “Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamburgers etc. Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!”
A dinner of champions, with only one winner: The event was very little about the Clemson Tigers, whose fate, on Monday evening, was to dine on lukewarm Whoppers, and very much about Donald Trump. The leader, that leader wants you to know, MacGyvered some McDonald’s, and that fact is an argument not just about the powers of the one government agent, but also about the limits of the others. The pragmatic reason for the McMeal, as the president noted, is the partial government shutdown that Trump himself initiated—and that he refuses to end—and that has resulted in, among other things, the reduction of staffers at the White House who might traditionally prepare a sumptuous meal for visiting dignitaries. (Adding to the limitations: a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., that kept even some nonfurloughed workers homebound on Monday.)
The broader implications of the meal, though, are philosophical. Lurking at the edges of the shutdown—wrapped, along with Wendy, around those rows of wilted burgers—are deeper questions about what government ultimately is for, and about what government can truly accomplish on behalf of a vast and hectic nation. Trump’s feast was in that sense also an argument, one that aligns him, to an unusual degree, with the most conservative elements of the party he is steadily remaking in his own image: Government, all those neat rows of Big Macs insist, isn’t as important as Americans have assumed. Institutions, staffs, teams: overrated. The government is shut down, after all, and yet the Filets-O-Fish appeared nonetheless, each steamed sandwich suggesting that, shutdown or no, the people shall have their feast. A McChicken in every pot.
The Trump Mcfeast also rendered clear a different kind of argument—this one about the new ways political communication will work in the age of viral iconography. In her remarkable new book Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, the digital-culture scholar An Xiao Mina argues that memes, even (and especially) the seemingly silly versions of them, can drive profound political change. Mina delves into the origin stories of Black Lives Matter, and of the Grass-Mud Horse protests in China, and of the Arab Spring, and of many more movements around the world that were born online and radiated out to shake the complacencies and complicities of the physical world.
One of the book’s sweeping themes is that these movements, though they vary considerably by country and context, are united by the same fundamental dynamics: Memes, remixable and participatory, have a universality. They tap into the deep desire for storytelling—and for story-receiving—that is such a profound part of being human. Memes can spark movements, and spread them. The most powerful among them can tap into what the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, whom Mina quotes in a chapter aptly titled “Chaos Magic,” calls “the deep story”: the set of beliefs and feelings that underscore the stories we tell, and that spread along with seemingly superficial takes and jokes and images. “Indeed,” Mina puts it, “memes allow us to more quickly develop the visual and verbal language around which movements organize.”
[ Read: When internet memes infiltrate the physical world ]
I thought of Mina’s book when I saw Donald Trump, hands outstretched, welcoming reporters into the State Dining Room to bear witness to a pile of Big Macs. The president was, as the cameras whirred, willfully making himself into a meme, and using the particular power of the meme—deep stories, shared symbols—to do exactly what Mina’s argument predicted he might: to advocate for disruptive political change. The viral images of the burgers suggest, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary, that government is not truly necessary; the only thing Americans really need, the Quarter Pounders whispered, is Trump himself. He is the strict father of political discourse and the generous father of myth, capable of providing the American family with the 21st century’s version of the fatted calf. He is all you—all we—need. I alone can fix it.
Trump might uniquely nourish authoritarian tendencies; his use of memes as modes of argument, though, is becoming more and more common. While Bill Clinton might have sent the first presidential email, and Barack Obama might have sent the first presidential tweet, Donald Trump is, meaningfully, the first of the internet presidents. He embodies some of the core logics of the internet as a medium: He presents, through his angry and smirking and sometimes typo-laden tweets (before he bragged about “1000 hamburgers,” on Tuesday morning, he boasted of the same amount of “hamberders”), a version of authenticity. He responds to Americans’ fatigue with institutions by insisting that he is a one-man show. It was once understood that politicians, at the highest levels, doubled as embodied committees, their words and actions the result of a team of behind-the-scenes advisers and writers and handlers and image-makers. (The West Wing wrung seven seasons out of precisely that understanding.) But the internet, which prizes immediacy and amateurism and the illusion, at least, of authenticity, is changing those assumptions.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of course, understands that shift. Ilhan Omar understands it. Beto O’Rourke, who last week live-streamed a dental cleaning, understands it. Elizabeth Warren is coming to understand it. So many rising leaders are coming to understand it. Donald Trump, however, was one of the first national politicians to fully weaponize the understanding: to use memes, essentially, to make his case directly to the American people. “We did it. We memed him into the presidency,” an attendee of Trump’s inaugural DeploraBall—the party derived its name from a gaffe that became its own kind of meme—told a reporter in 2017.
As politics bends to the will of the web, it is very likely that other wes will meme other politicians into positions of power. And it is very likely, as well, that Trump’s fast supper, for all its gaudy absurdities, will become, in its way, more common. The president used the circumstances created by the shutdown he had caused to argue for more shutdown; he used repetitive rows of mass productions to insist that government itself is redundant. It was genius; it was pernicious; it was extremely fitting for the times. Politics is, and always has been, a project of image-making; now, however, its spectacles can be assembled at the speed of a Big Mac.