Donald Trump has had a long love for McDonald’s, and now the President seems to be hoping the fast food chain can help the American people love him.
“I want to give a very special thanks to McDonald’s for slashing prices for your most popular items, bringing back Extra Value Meals,” Trump said in an address to McDonald’s franchise owners, operators, and suppliers on Monday. McDonald’s and its franchises brought back Extra Value Meals at $5 and $8 beginning in September for the first time since 2019.
“I hear you’re recommitting to the affordable options of Americans that we really know and love, all of the items that we love,” Trump, who called himself one of the fast-food chain’s “all-time most loyal customers,” said. “And I hear that McDonald’s is playing a very big role in getting prices down for this country.”
McDonald’s has become a barometer for consumer sentiment especially among lower-income customers due to its ubiquitousness across the country. The Economist’s Big Mac index—which tracks the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac burger in different countries—has also been used as an informal measure of purchasing power parity around the world. As of July, a Big Mac in the U.S. cost $6.01, an increase from $5.69 a year ago.
But McDonald’s more affordable offerings come at a cost to the company, as McDonald’s is subsidizing the price cut for the discounted meals amid a fall in consumer spending. Fast-casual chains, including Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and Cava, have also bemoaned slow customer traffic, which Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright attributed to unemployment, higher student loan repayment, and slowing real wage growth among young diners.
Those problems, coupled with persistent inflation, have made affordability the central political issue of the year. In some of the most closely-watched races in state and local elections two weeks ago, Democrats, from New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, won over voters with campaigns that focused on the issue of cost of living.
Trump, who won the presidential election with promises to bring down inflation, appears keen to claw the affordability message back to his side.
“Affordable should be our word, not theirs,” Trump said on Monday. “Democrats get up and they talk about ‘affordability,’ ‘affordable.’ They don’t say that they had the worst inflation in history, the highest energy prices in history, everything was the worst.”
But the President faces an uphill battle, as his trademark tariff policy has compounded the stubborn post-pandemic inflation that plagued the Joe Biden Administration. According to NBC’s grocery price tracker data, orange juice prices have jumped 29% year on year and the cost of beef has increased 13.5%. Businesses and investors have complained that Trump’s ever-changing tariffs and trade policies—which have earned him the nickname “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out” on Wall Street—make medium- and long-term decisions difficult.
The manufacturing sector, which Trump sought to revive through tariffs on countries that dominate global manufacturing, has continued to struggle. Manufacturing employment fell by around 42,000 jobs from April to August. Retaliatory measures from China have also created economic pain for Americans. Soybean farmers across the country saw their sales crippled after Beijing effectively froze new imports of the product in response to Trump’s tariffs. China, which was at one time the biggest importer of U.S. soybeans, resumed its orders after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met to discuss a trade deal last month.
And around two-thirds of voters polled by NBC before this year’s elections said they believe that Trump has fallen short on his promises to bring down inflation.
Grocery tariffs
The Administration has rolled back some aspects of Trump’s signature economic policy in order to ease rising grocery prices across the country.
On Thursday, the Trump Administration said it will remove tariffs on some agricultural imports from Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, and El Salvador under framework agreements. The next day, Trump signed an executive order exempting over 200 food products from those tariffs. That includes many everyday household items like bananas, oranges, beef, coffee, and spices, which will no longer be subject to reciprocal tariffs.
The White House has said the announcements are not a retreat from earlier policy.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai told NBC that the Administration is “committed to the tariff policies that have secured trillions in investments to make and hire in America along with unprecedented trade deals for American workers, industries, and farmers.” The tariff exemptions, Desai said, reflect “how the Administration has now secured a critical mass of trade deals with countries in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Asia.”
Desai also told NBC that the tariff exemptions apply to natural resources and agricultural products “not produced in the United States.” Still, some products that are now exempted from duties, including beef and oranges, are produced in the U.S.
“This is nothing new,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC on Monday. “If you go through all the trade deals that we’ve been doing all the way through, then there have been things that we decided it was prudent based on the economics of supply and demand to exempt.”
On Sunday, Hassett blamed rising prices on “Democrats spending” during the Biden Administration—as opposed to tariffs—but told ABC that prices will go down now that some tariffs have been removed “because the supply of the goods into the U.S. is going to increase.”
Rebates and refunds
Trump has also sought to assuage the cost-of-living crisis—and make his tariffs appear more appealing—by floating that the “trillions of dollars” in tariff revenue could be distributed as $2,000 dividend payouts to low- and middle-income Americans.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS! We are now the Richest, Most Respected Country In the World,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Nov. 9. “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, however, said the rebate checks would require a congressional vote. “We will see. We need legislation for that,” he told Fox News on Sunday.
Trump also said the tariff revenue would be used to pay off the U.S. national debt, which is over $38 trillion according to the Treasury Department. The government has collected $195 billion in customs duties for Fiscal Year 2025, according to the Treasury. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is nonpartisan, said even accounting for that revenue, lawmakers will still “need to identify substantially more deficit reduction to put debt on a sustainable path.”
The Supreme Court is also weighing whether Trump’s use of an emergency law to impose his reciprocal tariffs and fentanyl-related duties illegally bypassed Congress. If the court rules that the tariffs are illegal, the government may be forced to refund some of the billions in collected duties.
Nevertheless, the Trump Administration has suggested that it can reimpose some tariffs through other statutes.
Long mortgages, low wages
The Administration also said it plans to introduce 50-year mortgages for home buyers, which would give borrowers 20 more years to pay off their loans than the most common 30-year fixed mortgage and mean lower monthly payments. The plan has drawn criticism, though, including from some of Trump’s allies, who say that the extended mortgage would likely come with higher interest rates and ultimately mean Americans pay more over time.
The Trump Administration has argued that its various economic policies have promoted wage increases as another way of countering the strain of rising costs, although the pace of real income growth has slowed this year. And Trump doesn’t seem keen on all wages going up: The President told McDonald’s owners and operators that they will have to “fight” minimum wage increases, referring to California’s $20 minimum wage for fast food workers, which some criticize as having led companies to cut jobs.
“As President, I’m fighting every day to support small businesses like yours,” he told the group representing one of the largest companies in the world. “There’s still a lot of work to do, and we’re making tremendous progress.”
