In any other presidential campaign, one of the candidates’ mention of a summer job she held 40 years ago would probably just slip into the background chatter, a little biographical detail of no real consequence and not much political utility.
But what 2024 is experiencing is very much not a typical presidential campaign. And so Vice President Kamala Harris’s mention of having worked at a California McDonald’s in the summer of 1983 led directly to the unexpected sight of former president Donald Trump standing in the drive-through window of a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania, pretending to fill orders for pretend customers.
The line connecting those two things was Trump’s decision that Harris’s McDonald’s story was a useful way to call her dishonest. Despite Trump’s long track record of making obviously false claims, there’s not much difference in how Americans perceive the honesty of the two candidates. By stating that Harris had invented her service with the fast-food chain, Trump can play the same game he played with Barack Obama in 2011: Elevate a murky biographical detail in an effort to hopefully make people wary of a Black Democrat.
That detail is, in fact, murky. Last month, in an effort to unearth evidence of Harris’s employment, I tried to contact McDonald’s and the owners of the franchises on the island of Alameda, where she worked. But 1983 was in the pre-digital-data era and employment records for short-term workers at franchised fast-food chains from that period were almost certainly not considered essential documents to retain. I was able to find no evidence of her employment.
Trump and his allies used that informational vacuum to suggest that she never worked there at all, that she was simply an elitist attempting to pose as someone with working-class roots. And to really hammer that argument home, the billionaire former president spent part of Sunday posing as a McDonald’s employee. (The restaurant was closed and the cars that went through the drive-through were supporters who had been screened by the Secret Service.)
On his social media platform, Trump claimed that his campaign had obtained proof that Harris’s assertions were false.
“We have checked with McDonald’s, and they say, definitively, that there is no record of Lyin’ Kamala Harris ever having worked there,” he wrote Sunday afternoon. “In other words, she never worked there, and has lied about this ‘job’ for years.”
Notice the rhetorical jump there: from “no record of working” to “never worked.” It’s like saying that, if America’s collective memory and documentation of its history suddenly evaporated, we could prove that Trump was never president, since no record of his having done so exists.
The restaurant chain — obviously not unhappy at the attention — sent a message to its employees that was obtained by The Washington Post. It indicates that no records of Harris’s employment exist, but makes clear that this is not an aberration and not a reason to think that she didn’t.
“Though we are not a political brand,” the message reads, “we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.”
The reference to “1 in 8” is to a corporate marketing program highlighting that (it claims) about 1 in 8 Americans have at some point worked for the chain. As McDonald’s clearly accepts that Harris did.
The message from McDonald’s also touted how the owner of the franchise that Trump visited “was proud to highlight how he and his team serve their local community and make delicious food, like our World-Famous French Fries.” Sure enough, Trump briefly worked the fryer at the restaurant, in an attempt to suggest that he had more experience doing so than Harris did. (Which, again, is baseless.)
But it’s a rather incongruous message given that Trump is also trying to position his candidacy as centered on the promotion of healthy food. This is an offshoot of his endorsement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suggested, when abandoning his own candidacy, that Trump had committed to promoting healthy eating if reelected. Unless, you know, he can twist the knife on Harris.
We end where we started. There is no reason to think that Harris didn’t work at McDonald’s in 1983 and, as demonstrated above, every reason to think that Trump’s suggestion that she didn’t is offered in bad faith and without evidence. But, then, this is also not unusual in the 2024 presidential campaign.