鬼百合
Let It Burn!
No, McDonald’s didn’t confirm Trump’s baseless claim about Kamala Harris
In a message to employees obtained by The Washington Post, the fast-food giant made clear that it isn’t saying what Trump says it’s saying.In any other presidential campaign, one of the candidates’ mention of a summer job she held 40 years ago would probably just slip into the background chatter, a little biographical detail of no real consequence and not much political utility.
But what 2024 is experiencing is very much not a typical presidential campaign. And so Vice President Kamala Harris’s mention of having worked at a California McDonald’s in the summer of 1983 led directly to the unexpected sight of former president Donald Trump standing in the drive-through window of a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania, pretending to fill orders for pretend customers.
The line connecting those two things was Trump’s decision that Harris’s McDonald’s story was a useful way to call her dishonest. Despite Trump’s long track record of making obviously false claims, there’s not much difference in how Americans perceive the honesty of the two candidates. By stating Harris had invented her service with the fast-food chain, Trump can play the same game he played with Barack Obama in 2011: Elevate a murky biographical detail in an effort to hopefully make people wary of a Black Democrat.
That detail is, in fact, murky. Last month, in an effort to unearth evidence of Harris’s employment, I tried to contact McDonald’s and the owners of the franchises on the island of Alameda, where she worked. But 1983 was in the pre-digital-data era, and employment records for short-term workers at franchised fast-food chains from that period were almost certainly not considered essential documents to retain. I was able to find no evidence of her employment.
