Despite the myriad political failures of his second term, Donald Trump still has an annoying skill. His reality TV-style antics create the illusion that he’s relatable, even though, having grown up with unimaginable wealth, he’s probably never performed basic everyday tasks like grocery shopping, filling a gas tank or DoorDashing an order from McDonald’s.
On Monday the president emerged from the Oval Office to receive two bags of his beloved cheeseburgers and French fries from Sharon Simmons of Arkansas, a 58-year-old who quickly became known as “DoorDash Grandma.” The staged photo-op was meant to showcase Trump’s near-meaningless “no taxes on tips” policy. But White House reporters, clearly starved for a break from the stress of covering the administration’s non-stop scandals, lapped up the opportunity for a feel-good story. As Parker Molloy detailed in her Present Age newsletter, the press played along with the stunt, pretending in headlines — and sometimes in the stories themselves — that Simmons actually drove in from Arkansas to deliver food, ignoring that she’s an anti-tax activist who has previously played this Everywoman role for Republicans in need of her services.
After a round of credulous reporting, we finally got the debunkings that far fewer people will read: This wasn’t a real delivery. Simmons has not saved $11,000 on taxes from the policy; in fact, she probably saved little to no money at all. DoorDash appears to have coordinated this public relations stunt to counter accusations that the company exploits its workers by manipulating labor laws and even stealing tips.
Instead, Simmons is a troubling example of how so many white working-class Americans have been persuaded into voting against their own economic self-interests by Republican politicians who promote dangerous myths centering on bootstraps and personal responsibility.
But it’s also not fair to accuse Simmons of being a “paid plant,” as many progressives on social media have done. Instead, she is a troubling example of how so many white working-class Americans have been persuaded into voting against their own economic self-interests by Republican politicians who promote dangerous myths centering on bootstraps and personal responsibility.
The larger story Simmons tells — and there’s no reason to doubt its veracity — is that she’s been hustling for DoorDash because her husband has been battling cancer and they need money to pay for his treatments. Hers is a story of a society failing to meet basic responsibilities to its citizens. As Paul Waldman wrote Thursday in The Cross Section, in a halfway decent political system Simmons should be “settling into a comfortable retirement.” Her family should have access to health care coverage that would ensure “no one was crushed financially when they got sick.”
Simmons seems to have fully absorbed decades of toxic right-wing messaging that foists all the blame for an unjust system onto the very people who are being robbed blind. Last summer, she testified in a congressional field hearing, offering her support of DoorDash and GOP tax policy in a congressional field hearing, and her words made it clear how much she has internalized the view that it’s okay for people like her to work their fingers to the bone without any real hope of getting ahead.
Simmons spoke of having a “strong work ethic” that was instilled by her parents, who started bringing her to work when she was only four. Her 80-year-old mother, she added, “still works taking care of little children to cover life’s expenses.” Simmons praised DoorDash for offering her the “flexibility” that allows her to take care of her sick husband and family as she scrapes for “every extra dollar.”
As Waldman noted, Simmons is just the latest in a long line of would-be Republican folk heroes — like “Joe the Plumber” — meant to illustrate the party’s supposed connection to working people. The reality is a story involving the exploitation of working-class Americans by parasitic elites like Trump and the people in DoorDash’s C-suites. The country’s limited social safety net causes people — especially women like Simmons — to face impossible choices. By her own account, Simmons can’t take on steady, stable employment to make sure her husband is cared for. Instead, she has to take a shadowy job as an “independent contractor.” This allows the executives at DoorDash to extract often-excruciating hours of work from people like Simmons, without having to pay benefits or salaries that direct employees would receive.
Simmons revealed she made $22,000 in 2025. The CEO of DoorDash made $313 million in the same year.
The bootstraps narrative’s appeal to working-class Republican voters is obvious. Contrary to talking points pushed on Fox News and in other right-wing media, most people do not actually like to think of themselves as victims of an uncaring system. Terms like “work ethic” allow Americans who are being exploited to reimagine themselves as heroes, a personal identity that is psychologically soothing, even as they still struggle to make ends meet. Racist tropes have also been useful in selling this story to many white working-class people. During his 1976 presidential bid, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan popularized the racially-coded term “welfare queen” and introduced it into the political lexicon, where it served to, among other things, boost the self-esteem of many in the white working class by giving them a point of comparison. They were hard-working and productive, unlike those “welfare queens” they heard so much about.
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All this helps distract attention from the real villains: parasitical rich elites, who profit handsomely off people like Simmons while enjoying lives of luxury and privilege. During the 2024 election, billionaires accounted for nearly 20% of campaign spending, and then reaped the rewards in massive tax cuts and deregulation that significantly increased to their bottom line — all while making life much harder for the Sharon Simmonses of the world.
To my mind, the most odious part of the DoorDash Grandma stunt was when Trump, after being gently reminded by a reporter to tip Simmons, flourished a $100 bill while posing for pictures to illustrate his generosity. It’s true that $100 is a lot of money for someone in Simmons’ position, but for Trump, it’s meaningless. According to the Brennan Center, Trump has made about $3 billion — that we know of — since returning to office, most of it through cryptocurrency schemes and real estate deals that benefit from investors who have an interest in purchasing the good opinion of the American president. The president could have handed Simmons a million dollars and it would have made the same difference to his net worth as the $100 bill he showed off to the cameras. In that light, his tip wasn’t a kindness but a form of mockery: the billionaire Trump rubbing everyone’s noses in how vast the gulf is between them.
None of this is deny or downplay the complicity of people like Simmons in driving our country into a ditch. No one is forcing millions of Americans to reject progressive policies that could lead to a world where they wouldn’t have to scrounge for pennies while lazy billionaires like Trump make unbelievable amounts of money at the expense of the working-class Americans. Republican voters are actively choosing right-wing propaganda because the politics of change are hard. For many, it’s easier and more fun in the short term to indulge a flattering tale about how you’re a hard-working real American, unlike those [fill in the marginalized group being scapegoated]. It also does the left no favors to ignore that Republican voters have autonomy.
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But it might also help if Democrats, progressives or anyone that is troubled or outraged by the DoorDash Grandma stunt to be more outspoken about the foul class politics this bit of Donald Trump’s reality TV-style business is meant to hide. One reason it’s easy for working-class white voters to ignore or overlook their own exploitation is because there is a prudish unwillingness in most political quarters to call this out for what it is — or to bluntly indict the extremely wealthy in our society, like Trump.
There are some stirrings in the public discourse that suggests the existence of a deep, untapped well of anger at the hyper-rich. The troubling fact that Luigi Mangione became an overnight folk hero to some for allegedly killing the CEO of a health care corporation is just one example of this growing public mood. Violence is never the answer, and on the less extreme end, the fury can be seen in the fights for unionization at Amazon and Starbucks locations; in the successful anti-billionaire campaigns of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger; and even in the act of the 55-year-old English teacher in small town Indiana who sold ice cream sandwiches at the county fair that read “Eat the Rich” and featured the faces of wealthy Americans like Elon Musk.
Perhaps the time is ripe to more openly and peacefully redirect people’s anger away from already-oppressed scapegoats and toward the real villains ruining it all: billionaires like Donald Trump.
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