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Trump serves disturbing message through McDonald’s drive-thru window about whether he’ll accept election result

Ex-president once again raises notion that election could be tainted by fraud his campaign failed to prove existed in 2020

John Bowden
Washington DC
Monday 21 October 2024 05:08 BST
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Trump gives an unsettling answer to question on accepting 2024 election results
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Donald Trump was in suburban Pennsylvania on Sunday where he attempted to come across as America’s “everyman” president in a very modern way — by working at McDonald’s.

Instead, the former president created a kind of strange spectacle as he stoked fears about election fraud while wearing an apron through the restaurant’s drive-thru window. The scene that played out in the Feasterville neighborhood of the Lower Southampton Township, where the former president and his campaign took over a McDonald’s franchise restaurant owned by one of his supporters.

Follow our live coverage of 2024 US Election here.

The roughly hour-long photo opp closed down the restaurant entirely. A sign on the door said that the restaurant would be closed Sunday until 4pm, after the president and his entourage had left. During the visit, Trump had an apron tied behind his back by a McDonald’s cashier before he recieved a short demonstration of how to work the fry station and stuck his head through the drive-thru.

Trump proceeded to hand out a number of orders through the drive-thru window on Sunday, chatting to supporters who were picking up their meals.

As he took a question from a reporter through the drive-thru window, Trump once again resorted to baseless suggestions that the 2024 presidential election results would be tainted by fraud, a charge he and running mate JD Vance have repeated about the past presidential election.

“Will you accept the results of the election?” asked a reporter.

“Yeah, sure, if it’s a fair election,” the apron-clad Trump declared, his head fully poking out of the drive-thru.

Trump and his cronies spent months raising such claims in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but failed to win any of the legal challenges they filed against the final vote counts in the several states where the results were contested. Audits later failed to find any of the widespread fraud Trump claimed existed, and election officials roundly proclaimed the results to be accurate.

Donald Trump works the drive-thru at a McDonald’s during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania
Donald Trump works the drive-thru at a McDonald’s during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania (Getty Images)

Still, Trump would go on to repeat those claims for years, and he now looks poised to contest the results of the race again should he lose; whether it be through legal challenges or merely rhetoric.

His past efforts to gin up a mob to interfere in the certification of the Electoral College results in 2021 led to Congress passing legislation that reformed how that process is carried out.

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