An Interview, A Deep Fryer, and Arnold Palmer

We’ve got two weeks left.

As I write this it’s Monday night. As you read it, it will probably be Tuesday, two weeks before Election Day. Election day is your last possible day to vote; the actual voting is going on in many states across the country right now. My tiny Jefferson County, Ohio, has said they’ve had record turnout already. Nobody knows if that’s a good or a bad sign.

Yes, this is my weekly rundown of all the presidential election news I can remember since last week. Please keep referring back to my boilerplate on why the Catholic Church has no political party and it’s not a sin to vote your conscience.  I won’t be tolerating any spiritual abuse in my comment box.

The politicians are in full swing, giving their closing statements to anybody who will listen. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are still circling those same swing states over and over again. They’ve been in Pennsylvania so often, I bet they’ve earned enough Sheetz points to get a free MTO sub. Harris went so far as to appear on Fox News of all places, where Brett Baier interrupted and patronized her and showed the wrong video clip. She handled herself so well that Baier is still offended. But Lord knows if that’s going to lead to the Republican party shedding any voters.

Meanwhile, this Sunday, Trump put on a comical apron and worked a shift at the McDonald’s drive thru. And by “worked a shift,” I mean, the McDonald’s was closed to the public while he was there. The employees showed him how they worked the deep fryer and make the basket go up and down. I don’t know if he touched any food himself. And then he leaned out the drive thru window and handed bags of fries to Trump supporters who had been auditioned ahead of time to pretend to be customers. He’s being mocked for this, as well he might be.

Now, I believe I’ve made it clear that I’m as against Trump as I can possibly be. I don’t like the man on a personal level, and what’s more, I think he’s a danger to our democracy. But I’m going to give him a tiny bit of grace for this ridiculous stunt, because it’s very like other ridiculous stunts that politicians have been pulling ever since there have been politicians. Photo ops are almost always staged. When Harris and Vance go into a Sheetz and buy snacks on camera for a funny ad, the Sheetz has been cleared of normal customers and the Secret Service is guarding the door. When a politician gets photographed washing a dish at the soup kitchen, that doesn’t mean the soup kitchen is open just then. There’s a good reason for that. How could the Secret Service protect Trump from any weirdo who comes through a drive thru? And it would have been ridiculously dangerous for McDonald’s to let an elderly man who’s never cooked in his life show up at their franchise and make French fries for actual paying customers on camera. I’m not mad at him that he staged a day at work. That’s just being a politician.

I am, however, pretty upset that he completely dodged a question from a reporter about whether this stunt would encourage him to raise the minimum wage. He refused to answer “yes” or “no” and just babbled about how beautiful the deep fryer was.

I’m also curious that no good stalwart Evangelical Christians were offended that he was working a shift on a Sunday instead of going to church, but that point seems to have passed them by.

The McDonald’s stunt is not the most bizarre thing Trump has done in the past few days, however. The most bizarre thing was the speech he gave on Saturday night in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Latrobe happens to be the birthplace of the golfer Arnold Palmer. This is probably why Trump chose to ignore the teleprompter and start telling the audience Arnold Palmer stories for about twenty minutes. He included an anecdote about a communal shower wherein all the other showerers were fascinated by the size of Palmer’s, um, seven-iron. His putter. His driver, if you will. I  don’t play golf so I’m running out of euphemisms, and I have to use a euphemism because Patheos is a respectable network and we have standards here. But Trump just came out and told the story. Afterwards, he shouted that Kamala Harris was a “sh*t vice president.” Again, I’ve gotta censor that word because this is a family-friendly network, but Trump didn’t. He just said it, live on camera, in front of thousands of people. I’ve been trying not to burst out laughing every time I read the headlines since.

I keep retweeting videos of the incidents on my social media so that EVERY SINGLE WHOLESOME TRADITIONALIST CATHOLIC who told me I was going to hell for not voting for the Party of Family Values can watch their golden calf ranting about other men’s pee-pees on live television, two weeks before an election. In 2016, the usher at our Byzantine Catholic parish ranted at me in my blog comment box and lied about me because he was angry I wasn’t a Republican. The pastor yelled at my husband that I was “misleading the people with grave scandal” and didn’t say what scandal. Frank Pavone’s diehard fans harassed me and told me that I was a “pro-abort;” I had them in my combox speculating on all the secret abortions I’d had and the kinds of porn I probably watched. We lost friends. We lost community. We were very alone for a very long time because I kept on saying that Donald Trump is not a good man. To this day, I have people informing me I shouldn’t receive Holy Communion because it’s apparently a mortal sin to encourage people to vote against the Peepee Man and his cronies. Well, he’s yours now, Traditionalists. He’s all yours. Congratulations. You’re the Peepee party.

And you know what? The Peepee Party could still win.

Trump and Harris are neck and neck in the polls. The House looks safer than the Senate, but you never know.

Donald Trump is so clearly senile that if he is elected, you’ll only have the Peepee President for a few months if that. And then we get President Vance, a man with the charisma of a cinder block, who truly seems to not think that women are humans. Vance, who is such a sniveling sychophant that he called Trump Hitler right up until he felt he could get something out of supporting Trump. Vance, who is so cruel and so unabashed about using people that he threw his own constituents under the bus and instigated a moral panic against legal immigrants. Vance who is bought and paid for by billionaire techbro Peter Thiel, who is the opposite of a nice person. Vance, who together with Trump is being fêted and promoted by billionaire techbro Elon Musk, also not a nice person. This bizarre political alliance between billionaire techbros who believe nothing and traditionalist Catholics is looking even more hideous than the 50-year political alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.