Trump calls Oval Office DoorDash stunt ‘tacky’ after driver rejects his transphobic question

President Donald Trump on Thursday dismissed his own White House DoorDash photo-op as “tacky,” after an exchange in which the invited driver resisted his attempt to steer the moment toward transgender issues.

On Monday, Trump participated in a produced video promoting his “no tax on tips” policy, in which DoorDash driver Sharon Simmons, wearing a "DoorDash grandma" shirt, drove onto the South Lawn, a restricted area, and knocked on the Oval Office door as the president answered. The scene, built for visual impact, was designed to highlight the administration’s outreach to service workers.

By Thursday, speaking at a tax policy roundtable in Las Vegas, Trump struck a different tone.

“To be honest, it was a little tacky,” he said, describing the DoorDash and McDonald’s delivery as one of the “crazy ideas” that can be “a little embarrassing,” even as they draw attention.

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He went further, explicitly linking the stunt to earlier campaign theatrics. “They come up with these crazy ideas like McDonald’s … the garbage truck,” Trump said, referencing a series of highly visual campaign moments from 2024.

Those included a late-campaign appearance at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, where Trump worked a brief, staged shift serving fries, and a rally in Wisconsin where he climbed into a campaign-branded garbage truck while wearing a safety vest.

The DoorDash event followed a similar formula. The White House highlighted Simmons, an Arkansas-based driver who earned about $11,000 in tips last year, as an example of a worker benefiting from the administration’s tax cuts as her husband undergoes cancer treatment.

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But the moment that derailed the photo op came not from the staging, but from an exchange that ran counter to it.

Standing beside Simmons outside the Oval Office, Trump abruptly asked whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons said. “You don’t? I’ll bet you do,” Trump replied.

“No. I’m here about no tax on tips,” she said. Trump answered, “Yeah, ok,” and moved on. At another point, after a question about tipping, he reached into his pocket and handed her $100.

Near the end of the exchange, Simmons offered a final detail that punctuated the staged event.

“He actually, during the process [of cancer treatment], wrote a book,” Simmons said of her husband. “It’s a book on humility.”

In the same Las Vegas remarks, Trump veered into another aside while touting tax cuts for small businesses, briefly fixating on the phrase “corner store.” “What is a corner store? I’ve never heard that term,” he said, before adding, “I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described [as] a corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please?”