It Was An Insane Year For McDonald’s

It was an insane year for McDonald’s.

First, it was a future president. Then-candidate Donald Trump worked a shift at a McDonald’s outside Philadelphia during his presidential campaign. Whatever you think of Trump, it was a genius move. Trump is the funny populist who embraces his billionaire boss status; Kamala is the witless elite who claims to have worked there. If I were a swing voter in Pennsylvania this election, I would’ve been swung by Trump’s fryer skills. (Stream Daily Caller’s documentary ‘Cleaning Up Kamala’ HERE)

Then, it was a suspected criminal, and not just any old crook: the 26-year-old who may have allegedly assassinated United Healthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. A McDonald’s employee in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized the face of Luigi Mangione, the “strong person of interest” in Thompson’s murder, eating in the restaurant Monday morning, according to The New York Times. That someone apparently upset with corporate America, enough so to allegedly take out one of its leaders, would eat and get caught inside McDonald’s is an irony both amusing and very dark.

Once again, McDonald’s is back in the news. Back in the digital meme factory. For some, though, McDonald’s is always on the periphery. Physically. It’s a place you rarely go. It’s too dirty, too greasy. If you do eat it on occasion, you don’t step foot out of your car; you pick up your food at the drive-through window. The twice-a-year McDonald’s customer rarely orders inside and never sits inside. The other customers seem, to them, unpredictable, and the locations are never pretty. Franchises are located amid strip malls, on the corners of busy intersections. The tables are coated with a thin layer of impermeable grease, too stubborn even for the most carcinogenic, industrial-grade cleaning products known to man. For some, McDonald’s is always on the periphery because it’s gauche. (RELATED: Trump Takes His ‘Dudes Rock’ Campaign To A New Level With Shift At McDonald’s)

But for a whole other swath of America, McDonald’s is a mecca where things happen. The golden arches are a beacon. It’s where salt-of-the-earth retirees meet for coffee in the morning. It’s where older, married couples have lunch (or dinner). Where drifters hang out, take a load off and charge Samsung phones. Where construction workers eat, hard hats on. Criminals pass through as the homeless shoot up in the bathrooms. Hungover college students from the local state school shuffle in, bleary-eyed, zombie-like, with no inkling of the danger and the seediness that might surround them. For a whole swatch of America, McDonald’s is a focal point of their lives, without which they would be lost.

There is something so uniquely American, something almost too odd to be true, that the biggest political actor in history, and now one of the most notorious criminal suspects in the country, rose and fell at a McDonald’s. One saw his star rise to the Oval Office; the other saw handcuffs. And there are still places in America, physical ones, not online, where wild stuff is happening every day.