While still facing the fallout from his controversial visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, Donald Trump has launched a new line of attack on his Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris: baselessly claiming that she is lying about working at McDonald’s in the 1980s.
Harris has repeatedly mentioned her brief stint holding down a summer job at the fast food joint while at college since she ascended to the top of the Democratic party’s ticket.
And, for some reason, it appears to have gotten under Trump’s skin.
Over the weekend, the former president has repeatedly accused Harris – without any evidence – of lying about working at McDonald’s.
He first made the accusation while speaking at the Moms for Liberty convention in Washington on August 30: “She also said, ‘I worked at McDonald’s.’
“Turned out she didn’t work at McDonalds,” he declared to the crowd, bizarrely adding that: “After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there.”
He later fired out a post on Truth Social again accusing Harris of lying about her stint in a Golden Arches cap.
Complete with a fake image – another of his latest obsessions – Trump scathingly wrote: “Comrade Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonalds. SHE NEVER WORKED THERE, they think she’s “nuts.”
He then launched a McFlurry of other allegations that “Comrade Kamala” has supposedly been lying about: “Likewise, she lied about Fracking, the Border, Crime, the Economy, and the Democrat’s “Suckers and Losers” HOAX, concerning our great military. She also lied about Arlington Cemetery and Afghanistan. She lies about everything!!! DJT.”
He went on to make another post, writing on Truth Social that: “Kamala said she worked at McDonald’s – she never did. Lie!”
Then, at a California press conference on Friday, Trump repeated the claim yet again: “She never worked at McDonalds, it’s a lie.”
“She said she stood over those french fries when they were being fried, and it was so tough work,” he continued. “She never worked there. She’s a liar.”
Harris briefly worked at a McDonald’s restaurant in Alameda during a summer back in California between college semesters in the early 1980s.
She mentioned her brief stint on the fryer she joined a Las Vegas picket line with fast food workers in 2019 and again during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April.
“If we want to talk about these Golden Arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said in Las Vegas. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
She acknowledged in her remarks at the time that she did not rely on the job to support a family unlike many workers who do rely on income from typically lower-wage fast food work.
“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,” she added. “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 Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign and her running mate Tim Walz have underscored their middle-class upbringings to set them apart from their Republican rival, who has an estimated net worth of around $4.1 billion, and whose father famously gave him “a small loan of a million dollars” when Trump was starting his career.
“Two middle-class kids,” Harris wrote in an X post.
“One, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at McDonald’s. The other, a son of the Nebraska plains, who spent summers on the farm,” she added.
“Only in America is it possible that the two of us would be running together all the way to the White House.”
Right-wing outlet Free Beacon first questioned Harris’s time at McDonald’s in an article suggesting that she is lying because she did not include it on a resume when she was applying for unrelated law clerk positions in the late 1980s.
It took Trump less than 20 minutes to bash Harris after her campaign’s post.
In an effort to deflect from his Arlington National Cemetery visit, where he filmed a campaign video, smiled in front of gravestones, and two senior members of his campaign allegedly pushed and verbally abused a cemetery official, Trump has attacked far more than just Harris’s resume.
The GOP presidential candidate blamed “a complete lack of American Strength and Leadership” by Harris and President Joe Biden for the deaths of six Israeli hostages, including one US citizen, over the weekend, comparing the situations to the “Debacle of the Afghanistan Withdrawal,” he said in another Truth Social post.
He also proclaimed their deaths “would have never happened” if he were president.