One day after Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg penned a story under the headline “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’: The Republican Nominee’s Preoccupation with Dictators, and His Disdain for the American Military, Is Deepening,” Donald Trump was in Bucks County, putting on an apron for a day’s work at a local McDonald’s franchise.

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The streets leading to the fast-food restaurant were lined with thousands of supporters. This was in a county that had gone for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 and, in between, had also supported Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA).

Goldberg, with whom I had appeared on several panels of CBS News’s Face the Nation, dedicated 5,000 words, as did the New York Times, to John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff who, as the New York Times paraphrased, said: “Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”

The mood outside the McDonald’s was festive. Some protesters had shown up to taunt the Trump supporters, but the jawing back and forth was minimal as Trump worked the deep fryer at his favorite fast-food chain.

It was the ultimate troll, first because he loves McDonald’s and he knows most Americans also do, but second, because he was also trolling then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who said she had worked at a McDonald’s in California after her freshman year of college but never provided evidence of that employment.

The press and Democrats groaned, but if you were there, it was quite the move. Paul Sracic, the political scientist from Youngstown State, said in a story reported that day that if you followed the event on social media with clear eyes, you could see Trump was having fun — and so was everyone watching it. “A lot of the coverage out of the gate after the convention about Harris was this forced message about joy,” Sracic said. “You cannot watch this guy, the former president of the United States, waiting on people at the drive-thru window and not kind of smile at it.”

In that moment, Trump wasn’t just relatable; “he was able to poke fun at himself,” Sracic said.

For the next 10 days, news outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Politico, and Axios published articles repeating the charge that Trump was a fascist. It filled social media platforms. 

Cable news grabbed it. Harris called Trump a fascist on CNN. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, hosts Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski said he had fascist rhetoric.

Billionaire entrepreneur and television personality Mark Cuban echoed that Trump “absolutely” has “fascist tendencies.”

When Trump announced that he would hold a campaign event at Madison Square Garden, he was compared to Hitler because, 80 years earlier, a pro-Nazi rally had been held there. Never mind that Franklin Roosevelt had held a campaign rally there, as had Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton — all Democrats.

The New York Times’s coverage of Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden called the event “a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement.”

There were nine days left before the election, and the view from the New York Times was that Trump was closing a toss-up race that he now could lose because of “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

The outrage was focused on an insult comic who had called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Harris immediately issued a statement saying that Trump “fans the fuel of hate and division” before she flew to Michigan for a campaign event. Biden called the rally “simply embarrassing.”

It always amazes me how many think pieces can emerge within minutes of an event. Did these reporters go out and talk to voters? Seems unlikely. More likely, they picked up a phone and texted an activist to get the answer they wanted for the story — to support a premise they thought should be happening, not what was happening.

The outrage machine was churning out stories. According to the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, Trump stood to lose not only Puerto Rican voters but also his support among all Hispanic voters.

I was not convinced.

Holly Otterbein penned a piece in Politico with two other reporters, with the initial headline (later changed): “Donald Trump Has a Serious Puerto Rico Problem — in Pennsylvania!” They reported, “Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally.” That dismay was giving Harris an opening to win over all of the state’s Hispanic voters, especially the nearly half-million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent in Allentown — the city Trump was set to visit on Oct. 29.

Otterbein said her evidence of a backlash came from Puerto Rican voters who were lighting up WhatsApp chats and commenting in morning conversations at their bodegas. She added there were plans for a protest at Trump’s rally in Allentown, which is home to one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state.

I was skeptical. I had talked to many Hispanic people in Berks County and the Lehigh Valley for decades about traditional values, faith, and family. Hispanic voters in Pennsylvania had been moving to the right for a long time, and Trump was accelerating that shift.

The arena where Trump was speaking was in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood, so I got there early and camped out to talk to voters.

There was a massive crowd, many of Puerto Rican descent, but they weren’t there to protest; they were in line to see Trump.

As for the “big protest” against Trump, there was technically one about a block away from the event, with a few dozen people organized by Make the Road Action, which describes itself as the “largest Latinx organization in the state.”

I found no Hispanic Allentown resident who ever referred to themselves as Latinx. Instead, what I found outside the PPL Center were Trump supporters of all races happily waiting in line to get in.

Nothing had changed.

At the same time this event was going on, 200 miles straight down Interstate 95, people were waiting for Harris to speak at the Ellipse, a park in Washington, D.C. Unbeknownst to Harris, who was inside the White House, Biden was calling Trump supporters “garbage” on a Zoom call.

In that moment, three things that were supposed to go one way went an entirely different direction, nearly all at the same time.

Harris expected to have reporters give her glowing reviews for her dark speech attacking Trump from the same place where he gave his controversial “challenge the election” speech on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump expected to have to navigate the fallout from a cheeky joke by an insult comic. And Biden expected to continue to attack Trump on that issue on a Zoom call.

Nothing went as planned.

Instead of invoking a contrast to Trump and giving people a compelling reason to vote for her, Harris reminded voters that she works in the White House, a place most voters agreed had led the country down the wrong track for the past four years.

Harris also suffered from Biden’s sucking all the air out of the room as reporters scrambled to cover his remark that half the people in the country were “garbage.” As if on cue, national political reporters shamelessly and without conscience told the nation that Biden hadn’t really called Trump supporters garbage.

Jonathan Lemire at Politico said the Biden quote was taken out of context. The New York Times said it “appeared” Biden said it, and plenty of people on X claimed that Biden didn’t say what Biden did say.

Trump supporters with whom I talked were still in “revival mode.” They joked in our interviews that they weren’t sure if they were supposed to be fascists, Hitler supporters, or just plain garbage.

After years of being referred to as bitter, clinging to their guns and Bibles, irredeemable deplorables, racists, and extremists, everybody with whom I spoke believed that Biden meant it the way it sounded — and nobody was surprised by it.

What I had expected to write about that day was what happened in Allentown: Did Trump invoke the wrath of the local Puerto Rican community over a joke from an insult comedian? Was there a visible sign of anger from the community? Were people switching their votes? Did they protest? Was Trump contrite?

What happened instead was that Biden stole the limelight, and, no matter how hard the national press tried to cover for him, his use of “garbage” had a negative resonance.

On the drive home, I was struck by how quickly the garbage quip stuck. People had placed Trump signs on their garbage cans outside. Everywhere I stopped, people were talking about Biden’s remark. That night was Halloween, and I could count on two hands the number of people I saw wearing either garbage bags, orange safety vests, or McDonald’s uniforms as costumes.

For added measure, Trump jumped in a garbage truck in Michigan and drove it around. My goodness, he makes it look so easy to play them.

It was over in Pennsylvania. I wrote the story the next day, saying, “Whoever wins here will also win Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada because Pennsylvania is a bit more Democrat than those states.”

My boss bet me a shot of whiskey that I was wrong. I told him I prefer tequila.

I was not wrong. I went on CNN, Fox News, and several podcasts, stating my opinion despite the last-minute Ann Selzer poll out of Iowa saying that Harris was within striking distance of Trump.

Selzer is an icon in the polling world. She has done the Des Moines Register poll since 1997, and her predictions rarely miss.

It was the Saturday before the election, and for whatever reason, she found Harris and Trump neck and neck — a shocking result in Iowa, a state not considered to be competitive.

It was not to be.

A VERY CONSEQUENTIAL TWO WEEKS FOR DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

Later, I was watching the results from Erie, Luzerne, Northampton, and Bucks counties — the ones I knew would matter most. One by one, Trump was winning them. It was not even close. He was winning them far beyond 2016 numbers. By 10:00 p.m., I knew he’d won Pennsylvania. The Associated Press did not call the race here until 2:24 a.m. Soon after, it called Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.

My boss owed me some tequila.

Excerpted from Butler by Salena Zito. (Copyright 2025) Used with permission from Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Zito is a national political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.