What’s next for McDonald Trump? Palabok and Chicken Joy for the Filipino vote?

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks from a drive-thru window during a campaign stop at a McDonald’s, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, in Feasterville-Trevose, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

After manning the fry station in Bucks county, what will “McDonald Trump” do next? The Palabok and Chicken Joy at the Philadelphia Jollibee for the Filipino vote?

Unlikely.

But there’s a reason for everything the candidates do now, especially Trump’s recent reference to Arnold Palmer’s manhood.

I’ll explain.

With less than three weeks to go we are in full campaign stunt mode. You do anything to grab the voters playing hard to get, the still undecided yet persuadable voter. Pew Research says it’s 5 percent of the voters who say they have no preference and could go either way.

To get them, the candidates are resorting to what I call “fracking” for votes, somewhat appropriate in a swing state like Pennsylvania.

It’s where candidates inject hot liquid rhetoric deep down into the electorate at high pressure to create fissures, openings, hoping to loosen things up to allow extraction – not for oil or gas – but for those hard-to-get voters.

So, Trump went fast food for some fast votes, but Harris topped him, saying she’d work to change the federal minimum wage from $7.25 so that service workers could afford a decent life.

What’s Trump offering? Extra ketchup?

As for Trump’s obsession over the girth of Arnold Palmer, Trump was in Latrobe, the birthplace of the great golfer. But elevating Palmer and his manhood into the 2024 campaign rhetoric, was more than locker room talk.

In the first two weeks of October, the Trump campaign’s second highest TV buy was on anti-LGBTQ rights ads, specifically anti-trans rights. What better way to compliment the ad buy but to use Palmer to establish hetero-normative values.

Yes, it was crude and unpresidential. But Trump’s a convicted felon, who has been found liable of sexual assault and defamation in a civil court and has lied repeatedly on just about everything.

After the Access Hollywood tape of 2016 where he crudely talked about grabbing women by their p—y, how would he top it in 2024? Trump used Palmer to “frack” for votes among undecided men, suburban women, Blacks and Latinos.

All this week Trump has been full of lies.

Trump went to North Carolina and said money for hurricane victims had run out because it was spent on migrants. A lie. In fact, the Biden administration has delivered $102 million to individual Helene victims, and $300 million to the state.

And Trump knows his lies have a Jan. 6 effect. One man, armed with a handgun and a rifle, was arrested last week for threatening harm against FEMA employees assisting hurricane victims in North Carolina. So the base is riled up to violence, the innocent are intimidated. It’s not how a decent campaign should be run.

Oakland Museum’s Filipino American History tribute

I went to a unique celebration at the Oakland Museum last weekend, and my sense is the intimidation effect is real. Sunday was Kamala Harris’ 60th birthday, and normally one might expect a mention at a public gathering with three weeks before election day. But when people are constantly on guard and sensitive to the divisions politics creates, the tendency is to be apolitical at all times to avoid conflict.

Photo by Emil Guillermo

This is the page Harris wants to turn to where all Americans can engage normally over issues in public without ire.

The other way to do this is through art, and that’s what made the museum event a treat. John Calloway, jazz musician and San Francisco State music lecturer, presented his live multi-media experience on Buffalo Soldiers and the Philippine American War to a packed theater.

Calloway’s grandfather, John W. Calloway, was a Buffalo Soldier – the Army’s regiment of Black soldiers who served in the Philippines in the 1890s.

He also reported on the war for the Black press, notably the Richmond Planet. While the mainstream press insisted on the colonization of the Philippines and its savage people, John W. Calloway’s compassionate writings showed how Filipinos were anything but savages.

It was a two-way street. Through the Buffalo Soldiers, Filipinos learned about American culture and the difference between white and Blacks. “The colored soldiers do not push off the streets, spit on us, call us damn niggers, abuse us in all manner of ways, and connect race hatred with duty,” a Filipino interviewee told John W. Calloway.

He concluded, “The future of the Filipino I fear, is that of the Negro of the South.”

He said no one has any scruples as regards to the rights of the Filipino, who is kicked, cuffed at will, drawn up and degraded before their eyes, cast into prison after prison, stripped and searched time and again, humiliated, brutalized.

Said John W. Calloway: “Remember that I too was a member of an oppressed race.”

It was one of the best Filipino American History Month celebrations I had ever attended. Just enough facts. And all the feels.

I left wondering which current candidate would have had the empathy to do the right thing when it comes to the Philippines back then.

Surely, not the guy who talks about mass deportations and the “enemy within.” But definitely the woman who sees a better future and talks about “not going back.”

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He writes a column for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. See his micro-talk show on www.patreon.com/emilamok. He performs an excerpt from his Emil Amok Monologues, “Transdad,” Nov. 4 and 18 at the Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets available here.

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