On Oct. 20, 2024, Donald Trump performed one of the finest acts of campaign trolling in the history of American politics by working the fryer and serving meals at a McDonald’s franchise in eastern Pennsylvania. “Now I have worked at McDonald’s,” he told reporters while wearing an employee apron and leaning out the drive-thru window. “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala, she never worked here.”
Trump’s ingenious gambit had the intended effect by highlighting the lack of evidence for Kamala Harris’s dubious claim that she “did fries and … the cashier” at a McDonald’s in California during the summer of 1983. It all started in August 2024, when the Washington Free Beacon published a bombshell report on the weird circumstances surrounding Harris’s alleged employment. To this day, there is still no credible evidence to suggest that Harris actually worked at McDonald’s—a detail she revealed for the first time while running for president in 2019.
For example, Harris never mentioned her work at McDonald’s during her earlier campaigns for office in California. It didn’t appear in any of the books she published about her life in 2009, 2010, and 2019; the authors of two Harris biographies didn’t write about it either. She just blurted it out one day during a campaign appearance with striking McDonald’s workers in Las Vegas.
Hours after the Free Beacon sent the Harris campaign a list of detailed questions about her alleged work at McDonald’s, Politico published a whimsical story about the candidate’s “short stint” at the fast-food restaurant. “The McDonald’s nugget isn’t a new one for Harris as a candidate,” the outlet reported, citing the first-known mention of her alleged job in 2019.
The unusual story revealed that the Harris campaign had caught a “minor error” in a new campaign ad touting her work at McDonald’s. The ad’s narrator said she took the job to “pay her way” through college, when in fact she did it “just to earn a bit more spending money.” The campaign was eager to share this “very small piece” of Harris’s bio with voters, Politico wrote, because they believed it would help them connect with “young people and working-class voters.” The revised ad claimed that Harris “worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree,” implying she worked during the school year.
Days before the Free Beacon report went live, the Washington Post published a fawning piece about the new campaign ad highlighting the “lesser-known entry” on Harris’s résumé. Her claimed employment at McDonald’s, the Post wrote, exemplified the candidate’s “humble background.” The paper could not determine “precisely when Harris worked at McDonald’s,” but didn’t bother to investigate.
Mainstream journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf unearthed new details about the McDonald’s mystery in their book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. The authors claimed (without evidence) that Harris worked at McDonald’s for “two or three weeks” in 1983, and described how her campaign “spent weeks agonizing” over how to respond to the Free Beacon‘s reporting.
When aides suggested that Maya Harris, the candidate’s sister and alleged McDonald’s coworker, do a softball interview with a lifestyle magazine, it was shot down as “too risky.” When aides learned that a “major mainstream news outlet was investigating” the McDonald’s allegation, this caused “alarm inside the campaign”—a totally normal and not guilty reaction. The 2024 authors reported that when Harris saw the video of Trump working the deep fryer at McDonald’s, she “told aides he was doing it wrong.” An adviser urged her to “point that out in an interview,” but she never did.
Notwithstanding the Harris campaign’s desire to bury the issue, many Democrats continued to tout her McDonald’s experience during the election. Former president Bill Clinton and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) mentioned it during their speeches at the Democratic convention, whereas Harris did not in her acceptance speech. Mainstream journalists were not interested in learning the truth. Some went so far as to denounce the Free Beacon‘s reporting as racist nonsense.
The New York Times compared our fact-based journalism to the “birther” movement casting doubt on Barack Obama’s citizenship. The paper asserted that Harris worked at McDonald’s based on an interview with a close friend who remembered the candidate’s late mother telling her about the job decades earlier. The friend, Wanda Kagan, served as a campaign surrogate during the Democratic convention.
CNN’s Brian Stelter, who eagerly promoted conspiracies about “cheap fake” videos falsely portraying Joe Biden as cognitively impaired, said the Free Beacon‘s tireless efforts to uncover the truth were “bewildering.” Most Americans did not share Stelter’s distorted worldview. Just as most voters could tell that Biden was unfit to serve as president, a majority of Americans were not convinced Harris was telling the truth about working at McDonald’s. A poll released days before Election Day found that almost 60 percent of Americans did not believe or were unsure that Harris had actually worked there as claimed.
Happy Anniversary, Mr. President!
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