President Donald Trump was met with a custom mobile McDonald’s truck (branded in both English and Arabic) upon his first trip to Saudi Arabia since his inauguration in January. Trump’s love for the fast-food chain is well documented—during his first term, he frequently served McDonald’s at White House banquets, ate Egg McMuffins for breakfast, and famously worked the drive-thru for a photo op during his 2024 run.
Besides the double-staircase McDonald’s trailer, Trump was reportedly personally greeted at the airport in Riyadh by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) on Tuesday, a gesture Newsweek notes is “reserved for close allies.” Both acts are presumably meant to butter up the president, who promised MBS $142 billion in “state-of-the-art” defense and security equipment after securing a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S.
Photos and videos of the food truck quickly spread across social media. Journalist Olga Nesterova shared a video of the McDonald’s truck below a caption reading, “Saudi Royal Court now has a mobile McDonald’s serving Trump during his stay.”
The video seems to have originated with i24 journalist Mordechai Wagenheim, who posted the footage on X below the caption: “Yes, it’s a mobile McDonald’s here in Riyadh.”
The sheer absurdity of the scene, global diplomacy meets fast food franchise, quickly turned into fuel for memes and jokes.
Trump’s tax-slashing agenda follows him to Saudi Arabia
“Onion writers are sweating trying to come up with something dumber than this,” wrote @terminallyOL in a quote-retweet of the video with over 171K likes.
“Do you ever get tired of how stupid and on the nose everything is now” asked @phil_so_silly, hypothetically. On the one hand, yes. But on the other, it’s sort of freeing how all subtext has become completely flattened, like reality is just beating us in the head with a blunt object and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Related: Trump has reportedly been pressuring House Republicans to push through his “big beautiful bill” while in the Middle East, a bill that would raise Trump-era tax cuts primarily benefitting the wealthy and corporations, and cut $880 billion in spending from programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
“Can’t tell you how horrifying it is that the sentence “RFK Jr couldn’t stop Trump from eating at the Saudi Arabian mobile McDonalds because he was busy swimming in sewage” is 100% true,” wrote @esjesjes, referencing how the Secretary of Health and Human Services took his young grandchildren into a bacteria-infested creek on Mother’s Day.
At this point, political theater isn’t trying to be symbolic. It’s just pulling up to the world stage, supersized and branded.
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