President Donald Trump has decided he hates the “tacky” DoorDash delivery PR stunt at the Oval Office.
On Monday, Sharon Simmons, 58, a grandmother of 10 from Fayetteville, Arkansas, hand-delivered a McDonald’s order to the White House to promote an act passed by the Senate in May 2025, which aims to eliminate federal income taxes on tip income.
However, the story quickly took a different turn when it was revealed that Simmons has a history of Republican-backed appearances promoting the “No Tax on Tips” policy.
At an event in Las Vegas on Thursday, intended to promote the Republican tax agenda, Trump said that while he found Simmons “wonderful” and “beautiful,” he did not like the stunt.
“Sharon delivered McDonald’s to the Oval Office. It was a little bit of a… you know, I mean, to be honest, it was a little tacky,” he said, to laughter from the crowd. “You know, they come up with these crazy ideas like McDonald’s, although that was the biggest ever on Google, they say, number one ever. And the, the, uh, garbage truck. I mean, we do these things in politics. They’re a little embarrassing.”
Trump was referencing a 2024 stunt when he climbed into a Make America Great Again-themed garbage truck while campaigning in Wisconsin to draw attention to then-President Joe Biden’s remarks about Trump supporters and “garbage.” He appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage,” sparking conservative uproar. He later claimed he was responding to a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”
It’s not the first time the golden arches of McDonald’s have featured in a Trump campaign bit. In the lead-up to the election in 2024, Trump donned an apron and started serving fries at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. He seemingly had no issue with fast-food-themed stunts back then, declaring, “I could do this all day. I love McDonald’s, I love jobs, I love to see good jobs.”
He struck a different tone in the City of Angels on Thursday, ranting: “They’re a little tiny [bit] embarrassing, but we do them, and you win by landslides, you know. So we gotta keep to them.”
Seconds later, he was still fixating on the stunt, abandoning the prepared statement to riff. “It was a very beautiful woman standing there with two big bags of McDonald’s hamburgers. And I say, ‘Is this really believable?’ But the point of it was she made $11,000 that she had no idea was coming, and it was really great. It turned out to be really great.”
Simmons’s story kept changing, too. She said the $11,000 she saved in taxes would fund her husband’s cancer treatment. However, on Monday, she seemed to forget her own story several times. In one interview with Fox News Digital, she said she would “probably” save about $3,000 to $4,000.
However, in another interview with Fox’s America Reports, she said she earns half of her total income from tips. If the $11,000 figure tossed around by the White House and Trump is accurate, it would mean “DoorDash Grandma’s” salary is around just $22,000.
At that income level, most of her earnings would already be shielded by the standard deduction—the baseline tax break every filer receives.
The Daily Beast has contacted DoorDash for comment. The firm’s head of public affairs, Julian Crowley, suffered a public meltdown after criticism of the stunt.
“No one is claiming it was a real delivery,” Crowley posted on X on Tuesday. “It was clearly and obviously a planned event to mark a new policy starting. To claim Sharon is a prop, plant or an actor is totally wrong and off base.”
He also confirmed that DoorDash coached Simmons before she faced the president and the press. “Ofc we would speak to Sharon about what to expect before she appeared before the media and with the President,” he wrote. “But, Sharon spoke for herself and in support of No Tax on Tips.”
Critics were rankled by the fact that, before the DoorDash stunt, Simmons had testified before a House Ways and Means Committee field hearing in Nevada in July 2025 and had appeared in a promotional video posted by Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee.
