Donald Trump will not let go of his belief that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s as a college student—despite her repeated insistence she has.
Speaking at a press conference in New York on Thursday, the former president once again took the opportunity to call out Harris without citing any evidence to prove his theory.
“Kamala never had a job at McDonald’s. Her resume talks about McDonald’s, McDonald’s, McDonald’s.”
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Trump’s criticism came less than 24 hours after the vice president was again asked about the job on Wednesday night, by MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family and pay rent on that,” Harris said. “And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people, and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.”
On Thursday, Trump escalated the feud. “‘When I worked at the French fry counter, it was so tough, so hard,’” he said, mocking Harris. He later added: “She didn’t work there. She never worked at McDonald’s, it was a lie.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast earlier this month, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung demanded: “Why won’t they just provide real documentation and proof? The onus is on them. What does she have to hide?”
A Harris campaign official told the Beast at the time that she worked at a McDonald’s franchise in Alameda, California, in the summer of 1983.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to talk down the reports. At an Indiana, Pennsylvania, campaign rally on Monday, Trump taunted Harris once again, speculating that she was lying and claiming he would like to “work the french fry job for about a half an hour” at an unnamed franchise this week because “I wanna see how it is.” Trump has not been publicly seen working at one of its franchises thus far.
“She said she worked and she grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s,” “She never worked there! And these fake news reporters will never report it, they don’t want to report it because they’re fake,” he added. “They’re fake.”
At another rally in Arizona this month, he exclaimed, “She’s a liar. She doesn’t work at McDonald’s. She said she worked at McDonald’s, right? Right? She worked at McDonald’s. And she was working so hard. There’s only one problem. She didn’t work at McDonald’s. She’s a liar.”
The beef began after the Harris campaign published a video in August that said: “She grew up in the middle class home, she was the daughter of a working mom and she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree. Kamala Harris knows what it’s like to be middle class.”
Then, at a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington, the former president told supporters: “She also said, ‘I worked at McDonald’s.’ Turned out she didn’t work at McDonalds. After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there. There’s a lot of fake stuff going on,” Trump alleged.
“Kamala said she worked at McDonalds — She never did. Lie!” Trump later raged on Truth Social.
Harris repeated those claims at a rally at a Harris-Walz campaign rally in Las Vegas. She originally shared the news in 2019 when she joined striking McDonald’s workers on a picket line. At the Democratic National Convention this year the subject was also a hot topic, even scoring a mention from former President Bill Clinton.
McDonald’s, meanwhile, has remain tight-lipped on the issue.
