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There was always a risk of holy war when JD Vance came to Monroeville last Saturday.
His appearance was, after all, being hosted by evangelical Lance Wallnau, a Trump apostle who has suggested Kamala Harris uses witchcraft. As it turned out, Vance actually didn’t appear on stage with Wallnau at all. But his visit did prompt a crisis about a different spiritual matter: Primanti Brothers’ sandwiches.
As you’ve probably heard, Vance had planned to meet supporters at Primanti’s North Versailles location, only to have management tell him he and his entourage couldn’t enter. Attendees told WESA that the campaign was warned the restaurant would call the police if it tried to come in.
The company later said the sudden appearance of Vance’s security team and supporters caused “momentary confusion” that “was resolved quickly.” But by then the company was being torched on social media. (“I don’t want the crime party and fake news to come out and say, ‘Oh no, JD wasn’t really banned. It was miscommunication,’” said Washington County Republican chair Sean Logue. “He was banned.”)
As Logue and others noted, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz made their own visit to a Primanti’s location across town earlier this summer, just as earlier presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and John McCain once did.
Every indication is that the Harris campaign set up their event well in advance, and I can assure you Clinton’s visit was no more spontaneous than the rest of her campaign. When I reached out to Primanti’s to discuss events, they merely resent the weekend statement. But others say voters should have some sympathy.
“It's really hard for businesses when they are put in that position,” Oakmont Bakery owner Marc Serrao told me.
Serrao should know. Back in 2020, presidential offspring Eric Trump stopped by with what Serrao calls “a warning about 15 minutes in advance. Suddenly there were all these Secret Service guys there, and one said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I own the bakery.’”
Trump was taking part in a local tradition: Serraco sells cookies decorated with the face of presidential nominees and tracks sales of each as a sort of survey. (Hey, it’s at least as accurate as a Rasmussen poll.) Eric bought some with his father’s likeness and left soon after.
But “we got in tons of hot water,” Serrao recalls. Partly because Eric Trump removed his mask to speak with supporters — this was during COVID — “People were so mad. We had people calling the bakery and saying really vulgar stuff. It wasn't a good experience.”
I can tell you Vance is not the only national political candidate whose impromptu appearance has worried Primanti’s management. Back in 2019, I covered an appearance in which presidential hopeful Mark Sanford — an anti-Trump Republican, former South Carolina governor and Appalachian Traill non-hiker — stopped in Oakland to engage total strangers in discussions about the national debt. Among those who wanted nothing to do with him was the guy running the Forbes Avenue Primanti’s that night.
There’s a long tradition of politicians stopping by local businesses to prove they’re like the rest of us. And Stacy Rosenberg, an associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, says, “It's good to do that kind of grassroots campaigning, versus just blasting advertisements.”
But Rosenberg, whose areas of expertise include political campaigns and crisis communications, notes that the businesses in question “are definitely running a risk of alienating anyone who opposes that campaign.” Meanwhile when the photo op is over, officials “leave the business to deal with the aftermath.”
The risks have only increased in recent years. Serrao says he’s run the cookie poll since the early 1990s, but “The first time it was controversial was when Hilary and Trump ran against each other. Before that, people say, ‘I’m buying a dozen of these so I can bite his head off.”
But back then they were joking. And Rosenberg says social media has increased “the viral nature of these events and how they spread nationwide — even if it’s a local business.” Thus a controversy in North Versailles gets amplified by a Florida-based conservative with three million followers and the Twitter/X handle “Catturd2.”
Rosenberg says officials should tamp down tensions when voters attack a business unfairly, and Vance tried his best last weekend. Standing in the parking lot, he told supporters that he paid for their meals — “and of course when I gave them a nice tip I said ‘no taxes on tips’” — and that the manager “just got a little nervous. But it’s a great local business. Let’s keep on supporting it.”
That plea didn’t prevent efforts to drown Primanti’s with bad Yelp reviews. Nor did it apparently stop “threatening phone calls” made to another Primanti’s location. (Though Primanti’s didn’t respond to my questions about the calls either, and Pittsburgh police said they could provide no details on the situation.)
If there’s a consolation for Primanti’s, it may lie in Serrao’s recollection that despite the initial 2020 furor, “in the end our business went up.” A lot of social media outrage, he said, came from “way outside our customer base.”
In fact, Serrao had a visit of his own from Vance in August. He said he didn’t get much warning either: “Someone called me the night before and left a message on my voicemail that he might make a stop. I knew he was in town, but I didn’t really believe it. There was no caller ID.”
But Serrao says the visit went well: “He and his wife asked about the business and my family — no political stuff at all.” And public outcry was minimal.
Primanti’s hasn’t been so lucky, but Rosenberg predicted “it will blow over.”
Vance doesn’t have Trump’s outsized personality, she said, and “the news cycle is short. Eventually this will fade.”
True enough. It won’t be long before some other similarly important local food scandal unfolds. Like maybe a report that when Trump spattered White House walls with ketchup, he used Hunt’s.
