The first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have included a systematic attempt to dismantle government agencies and pillage their data; state-sponsored renditions of immigrants; flagrant corruption; and brazen flouting of laws and the courts. The New York Times editorial board summed it up well: “The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction.”
But let us also not forget how extremely dumb this term has been. We now inhabit a world beyond parody, where the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker. Consider the following report from Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia this week, posted by the foreign-affairs journalist Olga Nesterova: “As part of the red-carpet treatment, Saudi officials arranged for a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit to accompany President Trump during his stay.” A skeptical news consumer might be inclined to pause for a moment at the phrase fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit, their brain left to conjure what those words could possibly mean. (The Hamburglar clad in fatigues, perhaps? Ronald McDonald pulling on a Marlboro Red, an assault rifle slung across his back while on break from operating the Happy Meal command center/ball pit? A Death Star made of ground beef?) Thankfully, one’s mind needn’t wander far, as Nesterova attached a video of the fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit (FOMMU): It’s essentially a retrofit 18-wheeler made to look like a suburban fast-food restaurant, complete with modern wood siding and the golden arches.
The truck was reportedly parked near the state visit’s “media oasis,” perhaps also as an offering to journalists covering the president. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to whether Trump himself visited or ate at the unit. But the president’s fondness for McDonald’s is no secret.
It’s worth emphasizing that all of this is pretty embarrassing. Multiple news outlets, including Fox News, framed the truck as an act of burger diplomacy; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pandered to a mercurial elderly man, ostensibly to guarantee that a slender beef patty was never far from his lips. As with all things Trump, it’s hard to know exactly what to believe. Is the burger unit a stylized but mostly normal bit of state-visit infrastructure or is it a bauble meant to please the Fast-Food President? In a world where leaders seem eager to bend the knee to Trump’s every impulse, even the truly ridiculous seems plausible. The mere fact of all of this is unmooring. When strung together, the words fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit overwhelm my synapses; there could be no funnier or dumber phrase to chisel out of the English language.
I don’t quite subscribe to the notion that this kind of absurdity is a “distraction” from the many crises of the administration, as so many of the Trump era’s pseudo events are claimed to have been. Coverage of the FOMMU is instead a side effect of the wild incompetence and corruption of the 47th presidency. Trump has a complete disregard for laws and expertise, and a unique shamelessness, both of which create fertile soil for inanity. A fast-food tanker makes sense only on a continuum with Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, his spitballing about annexing Greenland or turning Canada into a state. It goes on and on. The Fox News host he hired to oversee the military, Pete Hegseth, reportedly wanted a makeup studio at the Pentagon (which Hegseth has denied). This week, Trump named his former defense attorney from his hush-money trial as the acting librarian of Congress.
See also: Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, which are hardly veiled—and successful—attempts to enrich his family. Recently, Trump announced a crypto fundraising dinner where wealthy people looking to curry favor with the president—including foreigners—can purchase his meme coin for a literal seat at the table. In early May, the crypto-investment company World Liberty Financial—to which Trump has intimate ties—announced that a state-backed Emirati firm would use a Trump-affiliated digital coin to help fund a $2 billion investment deal in Abu Dhabi. Nearly every detail of World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff’s announcement, “made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest,” the Times reported. Similarly, earlier this month, the owner of a Texas freight company announced that it would purchase $20 million worth of Trump’s meme coin, which it justified as an “effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US.”
And then there’s the gift to Trump of a $400 million super-luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar, which the administration appears ready to accept as a replacement for Air Force One. (The plane will supposedly be transferred to the Trump presidential library as the president prepares to leave office.) This is nakedly corrupt, but Trump has called it “a very public and transparent transaction.” As my colleague David Graham wrote recently, “One secret to his impunity thus far has been that rather than try to hide his misdeeds—that’s what amateurs such as Nixon and Harding did—he calculates that if he makes no pretense, he can get away with them.”
But Trump’s brazenness isn’t just a cover for his corruption. A headline on The Bulwark argued that Trump’s “unquenchable, unconstitutional greed is deforming America.” The verb choice here is especially apt. Trump hasn’t destroyed institutions as much as he’s distorted them, shaping them in his possibly Alibaba-ed gold-plated image.
And so the news that comes out of his administration is deformed as well. Instead of Snowden-esque stories of political intrigue, we get the shambolic equivalent: a national security adviser accidentally texting war plans to my boss on Signal; a government subagency, DOGE, named after a Shiba Inu meme and staffed in part by a 19-year-old who goes by the nickname “Big Balls.” We get Elon Musk doing a Tesla infomercial on the White House lawn while the president gawps at the car’s central console and exclaims, “Everything’s computer!”
Those who try to play along with the administration are made to look absurd as well. Look no further than the tech titans milling behind Trump on the inauguration dais or Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick justifying Trump’s disastrous tariff plan by arguing that Europeans “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.” If you’re Saudi Arabia, you embrace this dynamic by deploying a tactical burger unit for the leader of the free world.
The steady stream of bizarre news is the consequence of putting a person in charge of systems and institutions when he has no regard for those systems and institutions beyond his own self-interest. When these systems break under the stress of abuse, neglect, or general incompetence, bad things happen. Some of these things are straightforwardly bad: possibly illegal, horrific, cruel. Others would be scandals worthy of resignations if only there were political leaders able to enforce some accountability. But others are just weird mutations.
In this way, Trump’s callousness, indifference, and corruption alter the very texture of our shared reality. They drag us all into a world of his making. A system that is healthy does not produce a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit. Such units are reserved for the dumbest timeline, which is the one we’re currently living in.
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