Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is expected to visit a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday as he continues to criticize Democrat Kamala Harris and claim without evidence that she never worked at the fast-food chain while in college.
His plan on Sunday is to visit McDonald’s and work on the stove before heading to the evening town hall in Lancaster and then attending the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home game against the New York Jets.
In recent weeks, the former president has fixated on the summer job Harris said she had in college working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while attending Howard University in Washington. Trump claims the vice president never worked there, the latest example of his longtime strategy to capitalize on conspiracy theories and cast doubt on the authority of his political opponents.
Trump repeated that claim Friday night at a campaign rally in Detroit, saying Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s.” “It’s not a big deal, but I can be honest with you, it’s terrible,” Trump said. Harris, who was a California prosecutor before becoming a senator and vice president, touts her experience at McDonald’s as a way to show that she understands the struggles of the working class.
In an interview last month with MSNBC, she dismissed Trump’s claims, saying she worked at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college. “Part of the reason I’m even talking 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,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
Harris also said, “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent involves our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility is then to meet those needs.” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters in Saturday that Trump would stop “so that a candidate in this race could actually work at McDonald’s.”
“Since Kamala Harris didn’t, President Trump will be working at McDonald’s by the end of tomorrow. He will have made more fries than Kamala Harris ever did,” Miller said. “I think it shows that he’s connecting with hard-working Americans.”
The Harris campaign did not immediately comment on Trump’s plan for McDonald’s. McDonald’s officials did not respond to a request for comment on whether the company had employment records for one of its restaurants 40 years ago.
Trump promoted false and baseless claims throughout his campaign
This is far from the first time Trump has promoted baseless claims. Most notably, he falsely claimed that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden due to voter fraud. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.
Trump has long persecuted his opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities. Before running for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy, which falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was from Africa, not an American citizen, and therefore ineligible to be president.
Trump used it to raise his own political profile by asking to see Obama’s birth certificate, and five years after Obama did, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first run for president, Trump repeated a tabloid’s claims that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, who was born in Cuba, had ties to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump competed for the party’s 2016 nomination.
In January of this year, when Trump faced Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, in the Republican primary, he shared a post on his social media network falsely claiming that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she gave birth, which makes her ineligible to be president.
Haley was born in South Carolina, the daughter of Indian immigrants, which makes her an automatic natural-born citizen and meets the constitutional requirement to run for president. Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on the McDonald’s allegations four decades ago was a “puzzling departure” but that Trump “isn’t above throwing something at the wall, to to see if it would stick’.
“When Donald Trump isn’t talking about the economy and illegal immigration, he’s off topic about the things people care about,” Marson said. Marson suggested that Trump would be better off talking about the economy and immigration rather than what he called “off topic.”
“I don’t think there’s a undecided voter to answer or make a decision based on whether Kamala Harris actually worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s,” Marson said.
(This story was not edited by News18 staff and was published by a syndicated news agency feed – Associated Press)
