As Kamala Harris races to capture the Big Mac Voter, the Trump campaign is doubling down on its demand for proof that she worked at McDonald's in college.
“Why won’t they just provide real documentation and proof?” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email to the Daily Beast. “The onus is on them. What does she have to hide?"
Donald Trump has attacked the Democratic presidential nominee’s McDonald’s street creds as fake, accusing her of lying about having worked there as a college student. The smear tactics don't appear to be letting up. A Harris campaign official says she worked at a Golden Arches franchise in Alameda, California, during the summer of 1983, between her freshman and sophomore years as a Howard University college student.
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Harris made no mention of working at McDonald's in her memoir or in previous campaigns for elected office. But when she joined striking McDonald’s workers on a picket line in 2019, she shared that she worked at McDonald’s when she was a student—not to pay her way through college, as an early presidential campaign ad erroneously asserted, but to earn more spending money, as Politico reported.
“She worked the register and manned the fry and ice cream machines,” said the official, who requested anonymity in order to speak more—mcfreely?—about McFlurries and McNuggets.
Another senior aide, principal deputy Harris campaign manager Quentin Fulks, went on the record, saying the vice president’s middle-class roots, including her college summer job slinging fries and ringing up Happy Meal orders, is what positions her as the candidate for everyday Americans.
“It's a stark contrast to Donald Trump, who wants to explode costs on the middle class while handing out tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations—and that split screen will be on full display through November 5,” Fulks told the Daily Beast.
But the Harris campaign did not specify at which McDonald's franchise in Alameda—there are two—the vice president worked during the summer before her 19th birthday. And that will invite further scrutiny from Trump and his MAGA followers as both candidates barnstorm battleground states where the 2024 presidential election will be decided, pitching their opposing economic plans to capture the hearts and votes of working Americans.
As part of a massive, multi-millionaire dollar ad blitz against Trump, Harris has touted her college summer job working at McDonald’s while painting her Big Mac-gobbling-addicted, pro-billionaire opponent as the enemy of the working class.
In different ways, they both have a claim to stake on the Happy Meal voter: Harris is among the 1 in 8 Americans who has worked at McDonalds; Trump is among the 9 in 10 Americans who eat there at least once a year year—although his orders are takeout only.
She knows the workers; he knows the food.
“I know this menu better than you do,” Trump told workers at a McDonald’s in East Palestine, Ohio, after a toxic train wreck there last year. “I probably know it better than anybody in here.”
Until now, Harris had declined to defend herself against a groundswell of MAGA innuendo that she fabricated her experience working at the iconic fast food chain. Among other instances, Trump said on Truth Social this week, “Kamala said she worked at McDonalds — She never did. Lie!”
The Democratic presidential nominee had also largely deflected media inquiries asking for specifics about her McDonald’s employment, which had led some Democrats to worry she was falling prey to the kind of Trumpian trap that ensnared then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
Trump created a race-baiting conservative movement dubbed “birtherism” that claimed Obama was born in Africa—not in Hawaii—and, therefore, was ineligible to run for president of the United States. “I remember it wasn’t going to go away,” a former Obama campaign strategist told the Daily Beast in an interview on Thursday. The campaign finally sent officials to Hawaii to get a copy of Obama’s birth certificate to quell the furor.
Trump’s attacks on Harris’ Mickey D’s bonafides presented a similar quandary, the former Obama aide said, and one that should be addressed. While the Harris campaign may not have wanted to gratify the attack by trying to disprove it, the strategist said, “This seems to be an easier biographical question to answer than anything else.” Plus, he added, “They’re just going to find something else that you have to disprove.”
On The Drew Barrymore Show earlier this year, Harris shared her go-to order: a Quarter Pounder with cheese and fries.
Trump goes for “two big Macs, two Filet-o-Fish” and a chocolate shake, his once banished-but-embraced-again campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski told the substack political reporter Chris Cillizza. However, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has said Trump usually orders one Big Mac, one Filet-o-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake—which, either way, amounts to several thousand calories. (Trump, a well-known germaphobe, also prefers McDonalds to small, locally owned establishments because he thinks he’s less likely to be poisoned and finds the Golden Arches model to be cleaner.)
Trump, a master tactician in addition to being a fast-food junkie, had a goal when he sought to rob Harris of her McDonald’s story. “Trump wants to portray Harris, as he does all Democrats, as coastal elitists who look down on ordinary people,” Ron Brownstein, a veteran chronicler of presidential campaigns, told the Daily Beast. “So undermining her connection to McDonald’s would seem to me one element of that: in effect cutting her lifeline to the middle class so she drifts away into elitism.”
