Donald Trump is in a McFlurry about whether or not Kamala Harris really spent a summer slinging fries at a California McDonald’s, a claim she has repeated on the campaign trail in recent weeks.
“She never did,” he posted on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon, over a doctored image of the vice president in a Golden Arches baseball cap. “Lie!”
The post comes after a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington on Friday when the former president told supporters: “She also said, ‘I worked at McDonald’s.’ Turned out she didn’t work at McDonalds. After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there. There’s a lot of fake stuff going on,” Trump alleged.
The comments represented an endorsement of the right-wing’s latest attempt to discredit Harris, with the former president leaping headlong into the tempest in a tea kettle that is the question of what exactly Harris spent the summer of 1983 doing.
According to the Democratic presidential nominee, much of it was spent behind the cash register, fryer, and soft-serve machine at a McDonald’s in Alameda, where she hoped to earn a little extra pocket money between her freshman and sophomore years at Howard University.
Her campaign has used the gig to highlight Harris’ middle-class roots, as well as tie her to the roughly one in eight Americans, or 13 percent of the country, who have ever worked a shift at a McDonald’s, according to numbers put out by the company. It’s also been an effective tool to hammer Trump on his alienation from the common man.
“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s? Trying to make a McFlurry or something?” her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, asked at a recent campaign stop. “He knows this. He knows this. He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”
But the right only seemed to realize it could turn Harris’ time at McDonald’s into a straw man last Thursday, when conservative outlet Washington Free Beacon published a story questioning whether it ever actually happened. (The Harris campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on Sunday night.)
“She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President,” part of the article’s headline blared. “Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?”
Although Harris decidedly stepped up the McRhetoric after declaring her candidacy, she has talked about working at the burger chain in the past, including during an appearance on Drew Barrymore’s show in April, when she also revealed that her go-to order is a quarter-pounder with cheese and fries. (No chocolate shake?)
She similarly mentioned the job in 2019, when she traveled to a picket line of striking McDonald’s workers in Las Vegas, Nevada to stand in solidarity with their demand of a $15 minimum wage. “I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told the crowd.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” the vice president continued. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
The bulk of the Free Beacon’s article took umbrage with the fact that Harris did not mention her McDonald’s gig in either of her memoirs, published in 2010 and 2019. It also pointed out that Harris did not mention it in a job application she submitted in 1987 to clerk in the Alameda County district attorney’s office.
Instead, the application is stuffed with details about her time working at the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Senate, and two legal firms.
The Free Beacon also suggested that the fact that the campaign hasn’t flooded its feeds with photographic proof of a young Harris slinging fries is clear evidence of a cover-up. It similarly found it suspicious that McDonald’s hasn’t proudly played up its connection to the presidential candidate. A company spokesperson did not return the Free Beacon’s request for comment, despite the fact that the McDonald’s Corporation “is proud of its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian,” as the outlet sniffed.
The Daily Beast has reached out to McDonald’s to ask whether the corporate office maintains decades-old records of all employees who have worked at its franchise locations, as plenty of social media users quickly pointed out would be an absurd assumption. The fast-food behemoth did not immediately reply.
Of all the many valid reasons a Fortune 500 company might not want to weigh in on a one-sided political beef during a contentious election cycle, though, there is the added dimension that McDonald’s specifically might not want to antagonize its most diehard fan. The Golden Arches are supposed to be Trump’s turf, after all.
