Did Kamala Harris ever work at McDonald’s and if so, did the job help her “put herself through college?” Those might not seem like important questions on the surface, but when you consider the Democrat presidential nominee has been using the claim to fluff her supposedly hard-knock background, the truth of the matter becomes just a bit more relevant.
That’s especially true given Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, has been caught in a litany of lies, including stealing valor about carrying weapons in war. Here’s how the Harris campaign has been describing the supposed stint at McDonald’s.
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that “she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”
According to Harris, she “did fries” before moving over to work as a cashier, and that’s just the first part of the tale that doesn’t necessarily add up. The behind-the-counter dynamic at McDonald’s doesn’t typically have a specific person only cooking fries. With that said, it’s at least possible she labored at a unique McDonald’s that had her only cooking fries before moving over to be a cashier.
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What’s less believable is that this harrowing story of a working-class woman having to pay her way through college by salting fries was only worth mentioning when she began to run for president.
For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.”
It would seem odd for Harris to never mention this detail about her life story until she was in her mid-50s. She wrote multiple books, and none of them included her working at McDonald’s. The multiple biographers who profiled her apparently never knew about it either. Only when it became politically convenient did Harris start making the claim.
Then there’s her post-college resume, which never mentions any job at McDonald’s. In the same document, she mentioned fairly irrelevant details about her travel to Africa and India.
The Free Beacon also obtained a copy of Harris’s October 1987 job application for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, listed several jobs—including a month-long clerical job at a stock brokerage—in a section that asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. McDonald’s is absent.
Further, McDonald’s has not responded to multiple requests for comment on confirming her employment. As the Free Beacon notes, that’s a marked change from how fast-food chains have previously acknowledged presidential candidates who once worked for them.
Here’s the thing. This wouldn’t have mattered had the Harris campaign not decided to use the claim as a political pressure point against her opponent. The moment she and her handlers decided to do that, whether she was lying or not became a question that should be answered.
Taking all these strands one by one, they aren’t individually damning, but when you put them all together, it seems more and more likely she made up the claim for political gain. Lastly, this would be really easy to solve. All Harris has to do is tell us what restaurant she worked at, and it would take various investigative journalists a few hours to confirm her story. She won’t, though, and I think we all know why.
