Donald Trump Waving From McDonald's Drive-Thru

About

Donald Trump Waving From McDonald's Drive-Thru refers to a viral photograph of United States presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump waving from the drive-thru window of a McDonald's restaurant during his October 2024 photo op at a McDonald's location in Pennsylvania. Following the campaign stunt, the photograph saw viral spread online as it was used as source material for various memes, most notably edits that added various customers to the picture.

Origin

On October 20th, 2024, U.S. presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump took part in a photo op at a McDonald's restaurant in Featerville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. During the campaign event, Trump worked the fries station and served drive-thru orders.

On that day, a photograph of Donald Trump waving from the drive-thru window, taken by an unknown photographer, was shared on Donald J. Trump's official website^[1] and by several X^[2][3] accounts, including @LaCivitaC and @TeamTrump. The latter post garnered over 770 reposts and 5,100 likes in two days.

Spread

On October 20th and 21st, 2024, the photograph saw viral spread on X and other social media. On October 20th, the Instagram^[4] account realdonaldtrump posted the photo, with the post gaining over 1.3 million likes in two days. Later that day, X^[5] user @L0m3z posted the cropped image with a humorous You're Finally Awake caption (shown below). The post received over 810 reposts and 13,000 likes in one day.

On October 21st, 2024, multiple edits of the photograph were shared online. For example, that day, X^[6] user @BigDickBarclay edited in the family from the Japanese McDonald's Ad with a caption referencing Trump's friendship with Shinzo Abe. The post (shown below) received over 4,200 reposts and 50,000 likes in one day.

Multiple caption memes and edits based on the photograph were circulated on X / Twitter in the days following the photo op.

Various Examples

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