While past presidential candidates have been actors and business people, none of them (that we’re aware of, at least) have starred in a series of McDonald’s commercials opposite Grimace—until now. The series of commercials, which Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shouted out on last night’s Late Show, star Trump as himself and pimp a $1 Big N’ Tasty, a sandwich originally designed to compete with Burger King’s Whopper.
In the ads, which ran in 2002 and are as dumb as they sound, Trump seems astonished that Grimace, a character with essentially no brain and no back story, is managing to sell the Big N’ Tasty “for just a dollar,” though he does note in one ad that purple is a “very powerful” color. In another, he brags about owning a $4,000 pen, which, while it could be just a line in the script, seems about right. Sure, The Donald could have bought 4,000 of the very $1 menu item he touts to feed the less fortunate, but instead he bought a pen, something so inconsequential that car dealers and realtors often can’t even give them away. In other words, we’re voting for Grimace.