() – Donald Trump is bringing one of America’s most iconic companies, McDonald’s, into the political arena in the final days of his third run for the White House.
The former president is expected to visit one of the fast food chain’s franchises in Pennsylvania during his tour of the state this Sunday. There, he plans to work as a French fry manager, reported last week.
It’s the same job Vice President Kamala Harris has said she had when she was young, a biographical detail revealed during her first presidential campaign. Since then, she has become a central element of the middle-class origin story that has been key to her pitch to voters as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, Trump, whose deep love for McDonald’s and its products is well documented, has become obsessed with Harris’s employment there. In interviews and on the campaign trail, he regularly accuses Harris, without evidence, of making that fact up. Her visit to the restaurant is her latest attempt to sow doubts about the Democrat’s work history.
“I’m going to McDonald’s to work on the fries,” Trump told supporters this Saturday at a rally in the Pittsburgh area. “I think I’ll do it tomorrow, and I think it’s somewhere in Pennsylvania, and I’ll be all over those fries.”
Harris has largely ignored Trump, as well as calls from his supporters and inquiries from conservative media to provide evidence of her time there. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s impeachment and his upcoming visit to McDonald’s.
A campaign official told that Harris worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, during the summer of 1983 while she was still a student at Howard University in Washington. He worked the cash register and operated the French fry and ice cream machines, according to the official.
On Drew Barrymore’s talk show earlier this year, Harris told the actress, “I made French fries. And then I was a cashier.” And as a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris mentioned her work at the fast food chain while joining the Striking McDonald’s workers on the picket line.
His time there was mentioned repeatedly on stage at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, as allies contrasted his upbringing with Trump’s upper-class roots. Former President Bill Clinton joked that Harris would “break my record as the president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.” Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett stated that “one candidate worked at McDonald’s,” while “the other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
“Can you imagine Donald Trump working at McDonald’s?” said Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “You couldn’t operate that damn McFlurry machine if it cost you anything.”
Over the years, Trump has repeatedly questioned his rivals’ biographies, often without merit. He was one of the loudest voices in the discredited “birther” movement that falsely questioned the Barack Obama’s citizenship and his eligibility for the White House, ultimately leading the Hawaii-born president to release his full birth certificate. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that Senator Ted Cruz’s father helped in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this election cycle, Trump wrongly suggested that his opponent in the Republican primary, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, was not a U.S. citizen by birth and falsely claimed that Harris has only recently embraced her black heritage.
However, even as he leveled these accusations, Trump filled his own personal story with exaggerations and fabrications. He coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole” in his best-selling autobiography “The Art of the Deal,” an oxymoron that nonetheless illustrates his relationship to facts about himself.
“It is an innocent form of exaggeration,” he wrote, “and a very effective form of promotion.”
During a deposition in 2007, lawyers caught Trump lying at least 30 times in two days, mostly about mundane facts about their businesses, such as the size of their workforce, a payment for speaking fees and the cost of their golf membership. He also once claimed that he was in the rubble at ground zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that he paid his workers to clean up the rubble, neither of which is supported by public records.
And there are multiple accounts of Trump calling reporters under the alias “John Barron,” an alleged executive at his company who once duped a Forbes reporter to inflate Trump’s fortune on the magazine’s list of richest people.
It’s unclear why Trump has held on to Harris’ job at McDonald’s or why a visit there during one of his few remaining weekends before Election Day was warranted. But in recent interviews, Trump has suggested that one small detail about his rival’s past shouldn’t be discounted.
“We would say, well, that’s not a big lie. “It’s a big lie,” Trump said, “because McDonald’s was part of their whole thing.”
Trump also visited a McDonald’s early in his presidential campaign, this one in East Palestine, Ohio, after a train carryinghazardous materials derailed there, causing an environmental and public health crisis. There, he joked with a woman working the cash register: “I know this menu better than you. “I probably know him better than anyone here.”
The former president has long stated his affinity for fast food. During a town hall in 2016, Trump, who describes himself as a “very clean person,” attributed his preference for his offerings to quality control, saying, “It’s better to go there than to go somewhere where you don’t have idea of where food comes from.”
“I think the food is good. “I think all those places, Burger King, McDonald’s, I can live with that,” he added. “The other night I had Kentucky Fried Chicken. “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
Trump carried that affection to the White House, where he once served Clemson’s national champion football team a burger and pizza feast. His son-in-law Jared Kushner joked in his autobiography that he learned Trump had overcome the coronavirus when he ordered his favorite McDonald’s order.
“McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, French fries and a vanilla milkshake,” Kushner recalled.
In an appearance last week on Fox News, Donald Trump Jr. lamented that the network in its interview with Harris did not ask him which McDonald’s he worked at. She also claimed that her father’s familiarity with the network’s offerings would surpass that of the Democratic candidate.
“I think my father knows the McDonald’s menu better than Kamala Harris ever did,” Trump Jr. said.
‘s Kristen Holmes, Kate Sullivan and Ebony Davis contributed to this report
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