Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump planned to troll Vice President Kamala Harris for allegedly continuing to lie about having worked for McDonald's, rolling up his sleeves as a McDonald's fry cook in a campaign appearance Sunday.
And the Trump campaign is trolling Harris for having made baseless claims devoid of evidence.
Citing the past silence of Harris on ever having claimed to work for McDonald's until she ran for president and painted the picture of her being from "middle class" roots, The Washington Free Beacon dug into Harris' past to find evidence she has ever worked as a McDonald's french fry cook as she has claimed.
"It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s," according to the Free Beacon analysis of the McDonald's mystery. "But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign's coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative."
All the Free Beacon found was circumstantial evidence to the contrary, potentially debunking Harris' claim of having been a McDonald's french fry attendant and exposing her for a white lie in her effort to appeal to "working-class" and "middle-class" voters.
Notably, Harris is the daughter of a cancer researcher and a tenured Stanford economist, who Trump rebukes as a "Marxist" movement activist, the Free Beacon noted. Her parent's well-paying jobs are not the kind held by middle-class families, despite her campaign spinning that narrative, critics note.
Newsmax's legal expert Alan Dershowitz famously said, "It is hard to prove a negative," but the Free Beacon took the initiative to try.
Some of the facts the Free Beacon uncovered in its search of any potential support for Harris' potentially erroneous claim:
- "Harris' résumé a year after she graduated college makes no mention of McDonald's."
- Harris' campaign and surrogates continue to say she worked her way through college using McDonald's wages.
- But, notably, as Harris was accepting the Democrat presidential nomination without ever competing in the primary – neither 2020 nor 2024 – against the ousted President Joe Biden, a mid-August Politico report said past campaign messaging changed to "she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money," and not "pay her way through college."
- Politico, a main stream media outlet, filed that aforementioned report of the subtle messaging tweak "just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign."
- The New York Times, another main stream media outlet, published a timely historical record of Harris' upbringing, "reported without attribution" that Harris was a Howard University student in Washington, D.C., but returned "to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald's in Alameda, a city next to Oakland."
- "There is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019."
- Harris' memoirs published in July 2010 and January 2019 both fail to mention McDonald's: "'The Truths We Hold,' published ahead of her maiden presidential bid, does include a passage on the 'many jobs' she held in college, with no reference to McDonald's. It also devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working class and assails the service industry’s 'starvation wages.' Harris' McDonald's job is similarly absent from her 2009 book, 'Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.'"
- Harris biographers are in the dark about McDonald's experience on Harris' résumé, too: "A 2021 memoir by Stacey Johnson-Batiste, Harris' lifelong friend who grew up with her in California, does not mention McDonald's anywhere in the text. Dan Morain, who authored 'Kamala's Way: An American Life,' told the Free Beacon he was 'not aware' of her job at McDonald's."
- Harris made no mention of McDonald's work in her August Democratic National Convention speech billed as her "reintroduction," nor in the Milwaukee campaign rally that followed.
- An October 1987 job application obtained by the Free Beacon for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney's office listed three past positions on a form asking for five, but not McDonald's: "On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, listed several jobs — including a month-long clerical job at a stock brokerage — in a section that asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. McDonald's is absent."
- Harris' college application for then-University of California, Hastings College of the Law, obtained by the Free Beacon "included granular life experience on her résumé — extensive travel in India, Africa, Europe" and "lived in Montreal, Canada for six years" — but not McDonald's.
- The omission could be incidental, or even purposeful, but the Free Beacon noted many past Democrats have boasted food service jobs in an attempt to connect to working-class voters, including former President Barack Obama's "first job scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu," a claim that was quickly and thoroughly vetted with evidence, according to the Free Beacon.
McDonald's employs a full-time archivist to chronicle its 84-year history and even hailing its staffing alumni, but the company did not respond to the Free Beacon's requests for comments.
At recent campaign rallies this week, Trump noted he has a well-placed friend at McDonald's that has looked into Harris' employment records at the company and has been unable to find any evidence. Trump said he has had to do the investigative research the media should have been doing to vet Harris' claims.