Donald Trump is beside himself with excitement over the question of whether Kamala Harris actually spent a summer selling French fries at a McDonald’s in California – a claim she has repeated repeatedly during the election campaign in recent weeks.
“She never did that,” he posted on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon, above a doctored photo of the vice president wearing a Golden Arches baseball cap. “Lie!”
The post followed a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington on Friday, when the former president told supporters: “She also said, ‘I worked at McDonald’s.’ It turns out she didn’t work at McDonald’s. After an extensive investigation that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there. There’s a lot of fabrication going on,” Trump claimed.
With these comments, the former president supported the right’s latest attempt to discredit Harris, diving headlong into the question of what exactly Harris was doing in the summer of 1983.
According to the Democratic presidential candidate, she spent much of her time behind the cash register, fryer and soft serve machine at McDonald’s in Alameda, where she hoped to earn a little extra spending money between her freshman and sophomore years at Howard University.
Her campaign team used the appearance to highlight Harris’s middle-class roots and to link her to the roughly eight times American who has worked at McDonald’s, or 13 percent of the country, according to company figures. The appearance was also an effective way to accuse Trump of being alienated from ordinary people.
“Can you imagine Donald Trump working at McDonald’s? Trying to make a McFlurry or something like that?” her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, asked at a recent campaign event. “He knows that. He knows that. He couldn’t even run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”
But the right only seemed to realize last Thursday that it could use Harris’ time at McDonald’s as a straw man, when the conservative media Washington Free Beacon published an article questioning whether it ever actually happened. (The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.)
“She never mentioned it until she ran for president,” read part of the article’s headline. “Did she really toil under the golden arches?”
Although Harris ramped up her McRhetoric after announcing her candidacy, she has spoken about her work at the burger chain in the past, including during an appearance on Drew Barrymore’s show in April, when she revealed that her favorite order is a “hamburger” with cheese and fries. (No chocolate shake?)
She also mentioned the job in 2019 when she traveled to a picket line of striking McDonald’s workers in Las Vegas, Nevada, to show her solidarity with their demand for a $15 minimum wage. “I made the fries and the ice cream,” she told the crowd.
“There was no family that relied on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and pay the bills by the end of the month,” the vice president said Continuation“But the reality at McDonald’s is that the majority of people who work there today depend on that income to support a household and a family.”
The majority of Free Beacon‘S The article took exception to the fact that Harris did not mention her job at McDonald’s in any of her memoirs, published in 2010 and 2019. It also pointed out that Harris did not mention it in a 1987 application for a clerk position in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
Instead, the application is packed with details about her work at the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Senate and two law firms.
The Free Beacon Also said that the fact that the campaign has not flooded its feeds with photographic evidence of the young Harris selling fries is clear evidence of a cover-up. She also found it suspicious that McDonald’s has not proudly displayed its connection to the presidential candidate. A company spokesperson did not respond to the Free Beaconfor comment, although the McDonald’s Corporation “is proud of its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian,” as the media outlet snippily noted.
The Daily Beast contacted McDonald’s to ask whether the corporate office keeps decades-old records of all employees who have worked in the franchise stores, as many social media users quickly pointed out would be an absurd assumption. The fast-food giant did not respond immediately.
For all the many valid reasons why a Fortune 500 company might not want to get involved in a one-sided political dispute during a contentious election campaign, there is the added dimension that McDonald’s might not want to upset its most diehard fan. The Golden Arches are Trump’s turf, after all.
