When Donald Trump made a stop at a Pennsylvania McDonald's on Sunday to "work" the fry cooker and hand out McNuggets from the drive-thru window, the stage-managed political stunt was meant to draw attention to Kamala Harris referencing on the campaign trail that she worked at McDonald's for a summer in college.
The Trump camp has said, without evidence, it's a lie. At the same time, the Harris camp has not provided any evidence that the vice president did in fact work at the Golden Arches.
"I've now worked [at McDonald's] for 15 minutes more than Kamala," Trump said from the drive-thru window on Sunday, wearing an apron over his dress shirt and signature red tie.
Harris has recalled working at a McDonald's that her campaign has identified as the location on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., 41 years ago, in the summer of 1983 when she would have been a rising sophomore at Howard University.
Asked repeatedly by Newsweek for more details, the campaign has not responded. McDonald's corporate office has also not responded to repeated requests for more information, though the company made its first reference to such requests in a statement Sunday, saying in part "we and our franchisees don't have records for all positions dating back to the early '80s."
A friend of Harris', Wanda Kagan, told the New York Times that she recalled Harris having worked at McDonald's around that time. That recollection was based on what Harris' mother, who died 15 years ago, told her years ago.
Harris first mentioned the summer job in 2019, during her first presidential campaign.
She told striking McDonald's workers on a Las Vegas picket fence in 2019, "If we want to talk about these Golden Arches being a symbol for the best of America, well, the arches are falling short."
But prior to that, she did not mention it in the course of her other campaigns for public office, nor did it come up in two books she wrote. Further, it was left off a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet that investigated the claims in August.
That job application was for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney's office in October 1987. In a section asking the candidate to list every position they've held in the prior 10 years, Harris listed several jobs, but not the McDonald's gig.
Trump has used the lack of clarity on the McDonald's job to attack Harris repeatedly.
"Turned out she didn't work at McDonald's," Trump said at a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington over the summer. "After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there. There's a lot of fake stuff going on."
The Republican nominee would follow that up on Truth Social to claim that Harris "NEVER WORKED THERE," complete with a photoshopped of image of Harris wearing a McDonald's baseball cap.
Since the 2019 picket line reference, Harris has brought up her McDonald's job several times. In April, she appeared on Drew Barrymore's show to reveal her go-to order: a quarter-pounder with cheese and fries.
She's referred to herself as "a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at McDonald's," and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz as "a son of the Nebraska plains, who spent summers on the farm."
"Only in America is it possible that the two of us would be running together all the way to the White House," she wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
At the Democratic National Convention, Representative Jasmine Crockett compared Harris' college job to the Trump, who she said was "born with the silver spoon in his mouth," while former President Bill Clinton, a notoriously frequent McDonald's diner, poked fun that Harris would break has record as "the president who spent the most time at McDonald's."
"Working at McDonald's reinforces the 'I'm one of you' narrative, since so many of us started in such jobs like this (myself included)," James Haggerty, a crisis communication expert and CEO of PRCG Haggerty LLC, told Newsweek.
"It was, and is, a hard job, but—particularly in that generation—slinging burgers at McDonald's was seen as a stepping stone as you worked your way to better things."
"Rather than just saying 'I'm one of you,' Harris is showing it," he said. "That's the type of detail that puts meat on the bones of the story."
According to McDonald's, one in eight Americans, roughly 41 million people, have worked at one of the chain's 45,000 locations worldwide.
That includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, television host Jay Leno, Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda and even Harris' husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.
"McDonalds is everywhere and is the 'everyman' food venue," political expert Steven Schier told Newsweek. "If you are trying to broadly identify with working Americans of modest means, McDonalds is a place they frequent and know—and you can appear close to them at such a location."
But while Harris' campaign is working to make "McDonald's worker" a biographical signpost for the vice president, she's refused to give any attention to Trump's comments.
In September, a Trump campaign official told Newsweek that the Harris campaign has "completely shut down" on the matter, saying the vice president's team has not responded either to the Trump camp nor any reporter that's investigated her resume.
"McDonald's is code for Trump," Richard Laermer, the chief executive of RLM Public Relations, told Newsweek. "He likes to say things that get his base's attention. It's like saying she wasn't 'good enough' as a teen to even do that. Further, he talks about her as someone who lies — and that riles up his supporters."
"It fits in with his overarching narrative," Haggerty said.
Trump has regularly tried undercut the biographical details of his political opponents. He started the birtherism movement against former President Barack Obama, and made similar claims about his Republican primary rivals, including Senator Ted Cruz in 2016 and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley earlier this year.
The difference in those instances is that his unsubstantiated claims against Obama, Cruz and Haley were all easily debunked. That has not been the case with the McDonald's narrative.
Photo documentation of Harris time behind the register may be difficult to find, albeit not impossible. There is a photo of Emhoff during his McDonald's days, which was on full-display during his DNC intro.
"I still have the framed picture which you saw, and there was a ring, golden arches and all," he told the convention.
The Trump campaign official also told Newsweek that Harris' refusal to answer questions about her McGig also underscore her flip-flopping policy position. An Axios report found that she's shifted her positions on at least nine areas, including the environment, guns, immigration, reparations and Medicare for All.
"People are still learning about her identity and this raises curious and unresolved questions about her past," Schier said. "It's little wonder that her campaign wants to move on from this."
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