Trump loves McDonald’s as a brand, as a beacon of American success, and as a meal. Trump even took to the fryer and the drive-thru window for a 2024 campaign stunt, tossing fries to serve a carefully vetted flow of hungry McDonald’s customers. When promoting his "no tax on tips" policy, Trump’s DoorDash order was, naturally, a McDonald’s.
And when the Clemson Tigers came to the White House in 2019 to celebrate their national college football championship win, Trump laid on a veritable McFeast for them all; literally, a huge McDonald’s order spread across a table, among other fast food chains. Two numbers have defined the second term for both: what McDonald's is worth, and what America thinks of the president. Today, the pair has arrived at a similar place by different routes, though politics is the thread that links them.
McDonald's closed at $248.24 on Friday, September 18, down 14 percent from the $288.70 its shares fetched at the end of January last year. Over the same 20 months, Trump's approval rating, on Silver Bulletin's polling average, has fallen from 49.9 percent to 38.4—a drop of 11.5 points. But they did not fall neatly together.
First, a little technical throat clearing. Both lines in our chart above are drawn in standard units—each series measured as its distance from its own average across the period—to enable a poll number and a share price to share an axis. The chart wouldn’t be viable otherwise.
Read that way, the two numbers spent 2025 moving independently. Approval fell steeply from its inauguration high while McDonald's climbed, and, across that year, the two correlate at −0.32, so not at all. Then, from January 2026, they descend together, and for those nine months, the correlation is 0.90.
That appears to be more convincing evidence of a relationship between the two. But two series both sloping downward across the same stretch will correlate at roughly that level whether or not anything connects them, so we shouldn’t read too much into it. And the test that strips the shared trend out is whether their month-to-month movements align, and they don’t.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
