The defining moment of the 2024 presidential campaign, it can be argued, came almost exactly two years ago, on Sunday, Oct. 20, when then-former President Donald Trump traded his suit coat for a yellow apron and worked the fry station and the drive-thru window at a McDonald’s.

His staff picked a propitious location in the battleground state of Pennsylvania: lower Bucks County, just south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and about a mile west of U.S. 1, suburban turf settled a generation or two ago by the sons and daughters of blue-collar ethnic communities in northeast Philadelphia.