It’s one of those little biographical details meant to flavor how voters view a candidate, not to define them.
“Think about it. Two middle-class kids,” Vice President Kamala Harris said of the Democratic ticket at a rally last month. “One, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother. I had a summer job at McDonald’s. The other, a son of the Nebraska Plains who grew up working on a farm. Think about it.”
Her opponent in this year’s presidential election, by contrast, is a rich guy who grew up rich. Until he moved to the White House, the only place Donald Trump ever worked was for the private company that shares his name. He never worked on a farm, or at McDonald’s. You understand the point.
In recent days, though, it’s not Harris who’s been talking about her job at McDonald’s — it’s Trump. Because, according to the (notoriously unreliable) former president, she never worked at McDonald’s at all.
“She’s a liar. She doesn’t work at McDonald’s. She said she worked at McDonald’s, right?” Trump said at a rally in Arizona this month. “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.”
“She said she worked and she grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s,” Trump said in Pennsylvania on Monday. “It was such — she never worked there! And these fake news reports will never report it. They don’t want to report it because they’re fake.”
Trump claimed at a news conference earlier this month that “the only one that reported it was Fox.” In Pennsylvania, he claimed that reporters had gone to McDonald’s restaurants and asked, being told “we don’t know who the hell she is.”
There are no news articles on Fox’s website detailing any investigation. Fox News host Jesse Watters did mention having reached out to both McDonald’s and the Harris campaign this month, without success. Trump’s story about current McDonald’s employees not knowing who the vice president was and not knowing about the employment history of someone who’d worked at their store 40 years ago does not seem to have any basis in reality.
Over the course of this week, I spent some time looking into the story myself — not because I doubted Harris’s claim (since there’s no real reason to doubt it) but because I was curious if it was provable.
Harris has indicated that she worked at a restaurant in Alameda — an island on the east side of the San Francisco Bay — during the summer of 1983. Over at the Alameda-focused discussion board on Reddit, there was some discussion about which restaurant that would have been, the one on Central Avenue or the one on Shore Line Drive. Consensus seemed to be the former, since it wasn’t clear whether the latter existed at the time.
I called both, without success. Again, unsurprisingly: This was 40 years ago. I also discovered that both restaurants are owned by members of the same family. My call to them was not returned, even when I touted the potential historic nature of their franchises. Then I reached out to McDonald’s corporate, both to the company and to the company’s archivist (which, as an aside, seems like a very interesting job). No dice.
Technically, then, the claim exists within the formal parameter of “unproven,” which is what the fact-checking site Snopes has granted it. But it might just as well exist as “unprovable,” barring some release of records from the Social Security Administration.
The year 1983 exists on the other side of a digital curtain, in the Analog Dark Ages. It was a time when everything everyone did can’t simply be summoned up at will by people with access to a web browser. Had Harris foiled a burglary while working at the store, maybe it would have made it into a newspaper and been digitized into an online database. (I didn’t find any such article.) Maybe if she were an exceptional employee, it would have ended up in some McDonald’s marketing material somewhere. (Same.) But if she was just a college kid earning some extra money one summer? In the eyes of the internet, it’s like it didn’t even exist.
That’s what Trump seeks to exploit. It’s possible that he simply doesn’t understand what a summer job at McDonald’s entails — to Harris’s original point — and thinks that this should be provable somehow. Either way, it’s clear that he wants to leverage the murkiness, using it as so many demonstrably false claims have been leveraged against him. After all, his point in describing Harris as a “liar” in Arizona wasn’t to focus on the McDonald’s job but to use it to bolster his claim that she was similarly “lying” about issues related to abortion. He’s using a seemingly nebulous biographical detail to undermine Harris — precisely what he did with his claims about Barack Obama’s birthplace.
Since Trump has been saying that the McDonald’s story isn’t true, a lot of his supporters are saying it too, rushing to prove that Harris was being dishonest about her McDonald’s employment with the same intellectual rigor that they applied to uncovering voter fraud and pet eating.
For example: Many Harris critics have suggested that it is weird that Harris wouldn’t have mentioned this detail previously. The Washington Free Beacon obtained a résumé Harris submitted for a job at the district attorney’s office in 1987, noting that McDonald’s was missing. Suspicious! Instead, the single-page document listed her work as a law clerk, an assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and her internship with former California senator Alan Cranston.
Curious whether this was odd, I asked my sister — who, during high school in the late 1980s, worked at “The World’s Most Magnificent McDonald’s” — whether she included that employment on her résumé.
“Ha-ha,” she replied over text. “I don’t believe so, no.” Maybe when she was first out of college, she said, “but certainly not as a professional.”
Intending no disrespect to my sister, her experience just out of college also did not include work as a law clerk or for a U.S. senator.
During an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday, Harris was asked about her McDonald’s job by host Stephanie Ruhle: Had she worked at McDonald’s?
“I have,” she replied.
Ruhle tried to move on, but Harris drilled down.
“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 — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that,” she added. “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.”
Another difference is that Harris, unlike Trump, has earned the benefit of the doubt on assertions that may not be immediately provable.