The Trouble With the "DoorDash Grandma" - and All Republican Reg'lar Folk Avatars
When they pluck out an ordinary person and make them famous, not only does their story seldom add up, that story is meant to fool voters about the Republican agenda.
“This doesn’t look staged, does it?” said President Trump to the cameras after answering a door at the White House to greet Sharon Simmons, now known as the “DoorDash Grandma,” who was bringing him two bags of much-needed nourishment from McDonald’s. Because every day is another episode in the TV show of which he is executive producer, the president can’t resist calling attention to the artifice of it all.
This was, of course, not a real DoorDash delivery — among other things, Simmons lives in Arkansas, so she wouldn’t be the one bringing it to him anyway (even if the news media bizarrely characterized it as such). It was a media event coordinated between DoorDash and the White House to promote the provision in the Republican tax cut bill passed last year that exempts some tips from income taxes.
Chatting with the president, Simmons said she saved a whopping $11,000 from this change in tax law, which is impossible (see below). But she’s only the latest in a long line of Regular Folk Avatars: ordinary people who are plucked out of their quotidian lives to become symbols of some condition, policy, or grievance one party or the other wants to highlight.
Both parties do it, and have for some time. You probably remember some of them. Khizr Khan, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, who spoke at the 2016 Democratic convention to criticize Donald Trump over his xenophobic anti-immigrant bigotry. Laken Riley and the other murdered white girls Trump uses to claim that no one is safe from homicidal immigrants. Joe Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber,” the small business owner crippled by Barack Obama’s cruel tax increases (who in fact was only an aspiring business owner and was almost certainly not harmed by Obama’s tax policies). Oliver Anthony, the theretofore obscure musician with confused class politics whom the GOP made a hero for his song “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people in Kenosha.
The Republican Regular Folk Avatars are distinct in that they all have one thing in common: they are chosen to deceive voters about the GOP, its policies, or something about the country. Which is part of the reason why their stories often fall apart upon examination.
An $11,000 savings? No.
I want to be clear about this: I mostly feel bad for Sharon Simmons, because like all such avatars, she probably had no idea what she was getting into when she agreed to be used in this way. She did previously testify before Congress on the Trump administration’s behalf on this issue, so she’s been around the track at least once, but that was nothing compared to the level of attention she’s getting now. These avatars usually agree to participate in what Daniel Boorstin in 1961 termed “pseudo-events” without fully grasping what it will mean for the rest of their lives, especially their privacy. Inevitably, many wind up wishing it had never happened to them, even those who do their best to monetize their new-found fame.
While debunking the DoorDash Grandma isn’t my main point here, because I’m a pedantic scold, I can’t resist. And it does matter, because part of the Trump playbook is to exaggerate and lie about just how much GOP policies are transforming the lives of the proletariat for the better, to divert attention from the real beneficiaries of those policies. But I’ll be brief.
At the White House, Simmons told Trump that she saved $11,000 on her taxes this year because of the no-tax-on-tips provision. Or to be more specific, he said it first, and she confirmed it, which means that it was a figure she gave the White House and they prepared for him to cite. But it is simply impossible for her to have saved that much from this provision. Not unlikely, but impossible.
That’s because the no-tax-on-tips rule only allows you to deduct $25,000 in tips. Even if she earned the full $25,000, to save $11,000 she’d have to be paying a 44% tax rate on her total income (and keep in mind that this rule does not apply to payroll taxes, which have to be paid in full). No one pays that high a rate; the top tax bracket in 2025 was 37%, which applied to those earning over $626,351.
To illustrate this with an example more grounded in reality, let’s say that Simmons and her husband earned $100,000 last year. According to this handy calculator (I tried a couple others and got almost identical numbers), since she’s married and elderly, her income tax bill would be $7,551 (I’m assuming she’s over 65, but if she’s younger than that her bill would go up by just a couple hundred dollars, and the net effect of these calculations would be the same). If you reduced that taxable income to $75,000 by deducting the full amount of tips, her tax bill would be $4,551, or a savings of $3,000. Still pretty good, but not $11,000.
And guess what: After the White House repeatedly touted the idea that she got $11,000 in tax savings from the GOP tax bill, she went on Fox News and clarified, saying “I made over $11,000 in tips.” She declined to say how much she actually saved, but it was probably something in the range of $1,300. Again, nice to have, but not as much as the White House would like you to believe.
What the Grandma is supposed to communicate
So yes, Republicans and the conservative media machine celebrating Simmons are using her to exaggerate the effects of the no-tax-on-tips provision, which will help only a sliver of the population and give even them only modest benefits. The larger point they’re trying to make, just as they did with Joe the Plumber and many other avatars, is this: Republicans are for working people. Which is one of the most important messages the GOP must continually communicate, because when your party is so singularly devoted to the interests of the economic elite, you have to find ways to convince voters to ignore the truth of who your real constituents are.
Avatars are an important tool in that effort, because we’re all attracted to human stories; it’s a more effective way to grab attention and persuade an audience than showing people a bunch of charts and graphs. That’s why news stories (which are, after all, called “stories”) often begin and end by describing an individual who embodies the issue being reported on in a personal way. Once you realize how critical a feature this is of contemporary journalism, you’ll see it all the time. Writing about the effects of tariffs on the economy? Open with a small business owner having to pay them. Writing about the millions of Americans who are losing their health coverage? Begin with a portrait of one of those unfortunate American families.
Speaking of which, Simmons says that the tax break she got was particularly helpful to her and her husband, since he’s undergoing cancer treatment and it helps pay the medical bills. This is where we truly see what’s at work here. Instead of settling into a comfortable retirement — or even a busy one of volunteering and helping to care for her family — not only does Simmons have to run around town making deliveries for a company with a reputation for exploiting and abusing its workers, like millions of other gig workers she gets few if any benefits from this job.
And because of the gaps in our health insurance system — gaps that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have worked tirelessly to maintain and worsen — her family is saddled with bills for her husband’s cancer treatment that they have difficulty paying. Now just imagine if not only did she earn reasonable wages, her husband had no medical bills, because we had a national health insurance system in which everyone was covered and no one was crushed financially when they got sick.
Trump and Republicans tell us that is a naïve fantasy, that there is no way we can have such a system. But that’s how people live in every industrialized country on Earth — except for the United States. And because of the very tax bill that gave Simmons a four-figure break, 13.7 million Americans will lose their health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That’s the real story here, the one Trump and the entire conservative movement are working to keep everyone from understanding or thinking about. But maybe all those people losing their health insurance or facing ballooning premiums can join the DoorDash grandma and get second jobs delivering food, in the hope that at the end of the year they’ll get a few bucks back on their taxes.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This amounts to precisely where the GOP have excellence: lies and propaganda. Whereas the Dems depend on the MSM to be their propaganda wing. Why is this so? The Dems continually depend on a motley crew of media folk who are caught between the capitalist structures of their organizations and keeping the electorate, I mean customers, happy. So we get news largely without teeth or zeal, except for a very few targeted messengers.
Until Dem billionaires start ponying up and buying media providers like the GOP did with radio and other media providers in the 90s and continuing on to this day, the country will be saddled with lies claiming to support workers, while in reality serving only the GOP and the rich. There have been nearly four decades of increasing right wing propaganda via these gobbled up media outlets. How many were bought up toward progressive message dissemination?
And also look toward the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other right wing groups that foster right wing positions and talent via billionaire funds. How many Dem counterparts are there, and why do we not hear about them? Where are their trainees placed in the courts and government? Where are their position papers espousing human and worker values implemented into law?
The GOP has organized to tell lies to promote wealth of their funders and themselves and to retain power. But organizations can also promote precisely what the Dem party itself aspires to. We need both and we are 40 years behind.
Some of the most important conversations I've had have been in a rideshare or at my front door, with gig workers. Their backgrounds and reasons for doing it are extraordinarily diverse, often pretty remarkable in both the inspiring and heartbreaking direcions, but the theme of relentless fighting just to actually not lose moneybl by doing it is common. Gas prices do not help. Neither do graceless, stingy customers. This 'story' saddens me. This is a real person with very, very fearsomely real worries and this regime can only see the ways they can exploit them, and her.