Last month, Donald Trump joked about working “the french fry job” at McDonald’s after questions arose over Kamala Harris’s claim that she briefly worked at the fast food chain during a summer between college semesters in the early 1980s.
"For a long time, [Harris has] been talking about her experience at McDonald's. 'I worked at McDonald's, over the french fries, it was so hot,'" he said at a rally in Pennsylvania. "I think I'm gonna go to a McDonald's next week someplace, it might not be here in your place — I'm gonna go to a McDonald's and I'm gonna work the french fry job for about a half an hour, I wanna see how it is."
Trump has been teasing the planned visit ever since, and it appears to be happening this coming Sunday.
TRUMP: "Do you know what I am doing next week? I AM GOING TO A MCDONALDS TO WORK!" pic.twitter.com/JpYqWWZrRI
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) October 12, 2024
"Former President Donald Trump will make an unusual stop in the Philadelphia area this weekend: to work behind the counter at a McDonald’s," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Tuesday. "Trump will visit the state for a third time this week on Sunday to 'work the fry cooker' as part of an effort to tamp down on his Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign message about working at McDonald’s while in college, according to a source familiar with the matter."
The former president will make the stop at a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia area, the source said, but the exact location is still unclear. Trump is also scheduled to attend the Steelers-Jets game in Pittsburgh on Sunday, CBS News station KDKA reported.
Kamala's alleged stint at McDonald's in the California Bay Area after her freshman year in college is actually a recent addition to the carefully crafted personal narrative she's been developing for decades. For decades, she never mentioned this job — during her previous campaigns in California, nor in either of her two books. It’s also conspicuously absent from a job application and résumé she submitted just a year after graduating college. She first started using the story during her first presidential campaign back in 2019.
The sudden addition of the story to her personal narrative generated significant suspicion that it was another tall tale designed to help her connect with middle-class voters. Kamala constantly claims to have grown up in the middle class despite actually having an affluent background.
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Kamala presented her alleged McDonald's job as necessary to pay her way through college; she adjusted the narrative to say she took the job for extra spending money, likely due to her privileged background. This shift came after the Washington Free Beacon questioned her McDonald’s claims, yet the liberal media never questioned the McDonald's story.
Even Snopes conceded that there is zero evidence that Kamala worked at McDonald's.
Which brings us back to the real issue here: is it really a good idea for Trump to dwell on this?
I don't think Harris ever worked in a McDonald's. But in the grand scheme of things, with everything that is at stake in this election, is it really that important? Nothing about Harris is genuine, and while there's nothing currently available to prove that she did, there's no way to prove she didn't either.
Trump should have more strategically focused his rhetoric on this issue on highlighting Harris’s overall phoniness rather than fixating on her McDonald’s story. While his visit to McDonald’s might come off as clever trolling, it doesn’t resonate with what matters to most Americans.
