A Real Delivery
DoorDash’s head of public affairs said on Tuesday that “no one is claiming it was a real delivery.” You wouldn't know it from the media coverage.
“DOORDASH HITS THE OVAL OFFICE. $11,000 refund DELIVERED — all thanks to No Tax on Tips!”
That was the White House X account on Monday afternoon, hours after a DoorDash driver named Sharon Simmons, wearing a shirt that said “DoorDash Grandma,” walked up to the exterior door of the Oval Office and handed Donald Trump two bags of McDonald’s. All caps. HITS. DELIVERED. The White House wanted people to take this as exactly what it looked like: a DoorDash driver delivering McDonald’s to the president, a grandmother from Arkansas whose life had been changed by Trump’s signature tax cut.
On Tuesday, after people online started poking around the details, DoorDash’s head of public affairs Julian Crowley posted this on X: “No one is claiming it was a real delivery. It was clearly and obviously a planned event to mark a new policy starting.”
Except a lot of people had been claiming it was a real delivery, and they’d been doing it since Monday morning. The Associated Press ran “Trump tips DoorDash driver $100 for delivering McDonald’s to Oval Office.” CBS News went with “DoorDasher joins Trump for White House press event after delivering McDonald’s.” Reuters, ABC News, Fox News, Newsmax, The Hill, and the New York Post all ran some version of the same thing. So did CSPAN, which I’ll come back to later, because CSPAN doing this again is its own story.
The story the White House wanted told was told. DoorDash’s own marketing account helped tell it. The wire services and the networks helped tell it. And look, none of this is the end of the world. A president ordered McDonald’s at the office. It’s silly. But a whole lot of reporters managed to cover a staged corporate lobbying event as if a DoorDash driver had just shown up at the Oval Office with a bag of cheeseburgers, and that part is worth looking at.
About that DoorDasher
In July 2025, she testified at a House Ways & Means field hearing in Nevada about the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Rep. David Kustoff, a Tennessee Republican, posted the video of her testimony to his X account at the time. Nine months before she walked up to the Oval Office with two bags of McDonald’s, she was already on record as a supporter of the bill the Monday event was designed to promote. That information wasn’t hidden. Random people on X dug up the Kustoff video within hours of Monday’s photo op, which means any reporter who typed Simmons’s name into a search bar could have had the context before filing their story.
None of this is a knock on Simmons. She supports the No Tax on Tips policy. She said so in front of Congress nine months ago, and she said so again in front of the Oval Office on Monday. Agreeing to participate in a corporate-political event promoting a policy she believes in is a perfectly normal thing to do. Same goes for DoorDash celebrating a legislative win it had lobbied for, and the White House promoting a tax cut it had signed into law. These are all the things the parties involved were supposed to be doing. Nothing about any of it is a conspiracy. My beef is with the reporters whose job was to describe what happened.
DoorDash wasn’t really hiding it, either. The company’s own blog post called Monday’s event “an unconventional drop-off to commemorate the first anniversary of the No Tax on Tips policy.” That’s photo op language. You don’t write “commemorate the first anniversary” about a lunch order. The release came with a quote from Max Rettig, DoorDash’s Global Head of Public Policy, whose job at the company is legislative advocacy. “This moment represents something bigger than a single delivery,” Rettig said.
The logistics alone should have been enough. Sharon Simmons lives in Arkansas. You cannot open the DoorDash app, type in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and have a driver walk a bag of cheeseburgers up to the exterior door of the Oval Office. Getting onto White House grounds requires prior permission and a security screening. Getting near the president requires a lot more than that. Trump himself said the quiet part out loud to the reporters watching it all happen. “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” he asked. He said it because the people who wrote his press plan knew exactly what the reporters were going to ask, and they wanted to get there first.
The same story
Reuters tweeted: “Trump orders DoorDash to White House, trying to sell his tip tax cut.” “Trying to sell” is as close as any major outlet came to flagging the stunt energy of the thing. Reuters still got the verb wrong. DoorDash arranged the event with the White House, with Trump as the person they were organizing it around. The active verb in the headline belongs to the wrong actor.
ABC News had a different problem. The network tweeted: “President Trump appeared to accept a McDonald’s order from a ‘DoorDash Grandma’ before addressing the media at the White House.” “Appeared to accept” is the kind of cautious language reporters use when they aren’t sure something happened. The burgers were real. Trump took them. The uncertain part of this story was whether there was a delivery at all, and ABC’s sentence doesn’t touch that.
The CBS version has an extra layer. Before Kathryn Watson’s CBS article ran, the network’s White House correspondent tweeted from her personal account: “Not something you see every day — the president getting McDonald’s delivered to the Oval Office by DoorDash delivery.” That’s her voice, in real time, before any editor touched anything. Another CBS White House reporter, Olivia Rinaldi, tweeted, “The president just got McDonalds delivered to the Oval Office.” The article that followed carried the same framing straight through the lede and then reprinted what it called a “statement released by DoorDash” from Simmons. The statement included this sentence: “Today is a celebration of the advocacy of thousands of Dashers from around the country who fought to ensure we were included in this policy.” That’s comms-shop writing. Watson ran it as her own reporting, left out Simmons’s Ways and Means testimony, and skipped Trump’s “this doesn’t look staged” line, which the AP caught.
And then there’s the AP. Will Weissert wrote the body of the AP story and did the work. Here’s his third paragraph:
Trump popped out and said, “Hello. Nice to see you,” before proclaiming, “Look at this!” and then, glancing toward a pack of nearby reporters, offering, “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” It was, of course. Making it onto the White House grounds alone requires obtaining prior permission and passing through security, while accessing the Oval Office — not to mention getting so close to the president — would have been impossible without additional screenings and background checks.
Weissert said in print that the event was staged, and explained what it would have taken to pull off the version being presented. Then the AP headline desk ran this above his story: “Trump tips DoorDash driver $100 for delivering McDonald’s to Oval Office.” If you only read the headline, which is, sadly, how most people encounter wire stories, you saw “delivering” and moved on.
A few outlets ran a factual error on top of the delivery framing. The $11,000 figure the White House tweeted about is Simmons’s total tipped income for the year. The deduction on her tips saved her “three to four thousand dollars,” as she told Fox News Digital. The @WhiteHouse account called the $11,000 a “refund.” CBS’s Watson wrote that the policy “netted her $11,000 more than she would have earned otherwise.” Fox News said she was “taking home more than $11,000 in extra income.” All three are wrong. Weissert, at the AP, got it right, noting her actual savings were “difficult to verify without Simmons’ tax statement.”
And the majors were not alone. The Hill and the New York Post both used “delivery” framing in their headlines. Fox News called it a “special delivery.” On Newsmax, host Rob Finnerty told his audience Trump had done “something that no other president has ever done,” describing a corporate political event as a historic first. I could keep going, but you get the idea. Nobody checked.
A word about CSPAN
In October 2024, I wrote a piece here at The Present Age about the way the press had covered Trump’s last big McDonald’s stunt. The one where he “worked” a closed McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for 15 minutes, serving pre-screened customers at the drive-thru. I called out specific outlets by name for treating it as news. One of them was CSPAN.
"You Want Lies With That?" News Media Struggle to Cover Trump's Potemkin McDonald's Photo Op
Over the weekend, you may have seen photos of former President Donald Trump “working” at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s location. Clad in an apron, Trump was photographed manning the fry station and handing out bags through the drive-thru window. It was a picture-perfect moment that quickly made the rounds on social media and news outlets alike.
Here’s what I wrote at the time:
The official CSPAN account announced: “Former President Trump Works at McDonald’s in Bucks County, PA.” Their website elaborated slightly but still missed key details.
Eighteen months later, here’s CSPAN on Monday:
President Trump receives DoorDash McDonald’s order and speaks with delivery driver: “I think you voted for me?” Delivery driver: “Maybe.”
Same account. Same framing pattern. Same description of a coordinated political event as a thing that just happened on its own. No reference to the White House arranging the rollout with DoorDash’s public policy team. No indication that Simmons was already a Republican witness on tax policy. Just the event, presented straight.
Here’s the thing. The critique of how the press covered Trump’s 2024 McDonald’s stunt was not obscure. It was everywhere for days. “The store was closed and the customers were pre-screened” was one of the most common observations in political media that week. I have to assume the people running CSPAN’s social media account exist in the same media ecosystem as the rest of us.
They just don’t really have a reason to care. The staged version is easier. The footage is handed to you. The quotes are handed to you. Nobody’s going to lose a job over describing a coordinated White House event as “President Trump receives DoorDash McDonald’s order.” It’s a small thing. It’s always a small thing. That’s sort of the point.
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