Trump attempts to troll Harris by serving french fries at a Pennsylvania McDonald's
Trump worked the fry machine and served pre-selected customers as he continued to cast doubt, without evidence, on Harris' summer job years ago.
FEASTERVILLE, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump served up french fries Sunday at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s, oversalting spuds and peppering in some jabs at Vice President Kamala Harris.
The franchise in Feasterville was closed for normal business during Sunday’s photo op. The customers who went through the drive thru were pre-selected by the franchise and the local Trump campaign team, according to a person familiar with the event. The cars were also screened and searched, and the people in them were wanded down, according to the source.
The campaign visit in the critical battleground state just over two weeks from Election Day was designed to troll Harris, who has talked about working at one of the fast-food chain’s restaurants when she was younger. Without evidence, Trump has accused Harris of lying about the experience as a way to improve her working-class credibility.
Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claims Sunday.
“It was a big part of her resume that she worked at McDonald’s — how tough a job it was,” Trump said at the restaurant in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. “She … made the french fries, and she talked about the heat: ‘It was so tough.’ She’s never worked at McDonald’s.”
Harris spokesperson Ian Sams shot back in a statement to NBC News.
“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie,” Sams said. “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because he was handed millions on a silver platter, only to blow it.”
Harris, according to her campaign, worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, during the summer of 1983. She was a student at Howard University at the time and worked the , as well as the french fry and ice cream machines.
In a statement, the location’s owner and operator, Derek Giacomantonio, said that he decided to participate in the Trump campaign event because “it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community.”
Trump’s own love of fast food is well documented. During a government shutdown in 2019, he famously served McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Domino’s pizza on silver platters to welcome and celebrate the national college football champion Clemson Tigers during their White House visit.
During his half-hour shift Sunday, Trump traded his suit jacket for an apron and received a brief tutorial from a fry cook. He then took a turn at the deep fryer himself, dropping two batches of potatoes into hot oil and waiting for them to cook. He mostly followed instructions, though he forgot to fully drain the oil from one batch and appeared to be more generous with the salt.
Trump marveled repeatedly about how the fries are packaged, with the aid of a scooper-like device.
“Never touched by a human hand,” he said at one point. “Nice and clean.”
Trump then turned his attention to the drive-thru window, filling several orders and chatting with customers as they came by in their cars.
“This is not a normal situation, is it?” he remarked, before assuring customers they would not have to pay for their food and bragging that he had made their fries himself.
“There will be no charge,” he said. “Trump is paying for it. … This is all on Trump, am I allowed to do that?”
Several customers called out Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan as they came through the line.
“I wouldn’t mind this job,” Trump said. “I like this job. I would come back and do it again.”
Trump also served up fries to and took questions from gathered reporters. He dodged directly answering whether the federal minimum wage should be raised.
“Oh, you’re very stingy with the product,” he said to an employee filling bags with fries. “Look at that. She’s a good worker. That’s the kind of people you want to have. She gave them one french fry for 30 reporters.”
Toward the end of his appearance, Trump was informed it was Harris' 60th birthday.
“I think I’ll get her some flowers,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get her some fries.”
Did Kamala Harris work at McDonald’s? Here’s everything we know
What has Kamala Harris said? Why has Donald Trump jumped on it? Have McDonald’s confirmed she worked at the restaurant? All we know, here
Cameron Henderson. Benedict Smith
21 October 2024
The question of whether Kamala Harris ever worked at McDonald’s has become one of the most unexpected talking points of the election campaign.
The Democratic candidate has used it to burnish her middle-class credentials by claiming her time behind the deep fryer helped fund her way through law school.
But Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have pounced on Ms Harris’s claims, accusing her of lying in a desperate attempt to make her seem more relatable to voters.
McDonald’s reportedly said it could not confirm claims made by either camps because its records do not extend back to when the vice-president would have served french fries to customers.
“We and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early 80s,” it said in an internal memo circulated to staff, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Ms Harris has also failed to provide anything more than a vague of her time at the golden arches.
When The Telegraph visited branches in the area where she claimed to have worked, we found staff had been told they were not to talk about whether she had ever worked at McDonald’s.
Now, Trump has taken things a step further, by entering the kitchen himself and serving up portions of fries to ers at a franchise in Pennsylvania.
Asked how he found swapping his suit for an apron at the fast food restaurant, the Republican candidate said: “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala at McDonald’s.”
The ongoing sparring match has raised questions about the truth of Ms Harris’ claims and put pressure on the Democratic candidate to come clean about which restaurant she worked at.
Here’s everything you need to know about whether Ms Harris ever worked at McDonald’s.
What has McDonald’s said?
The Telegraph visited all three McDonald’s restaurants in the Almeda region of California where Ms Harris claims to have worked and found that employees had been sworn to secrecy at one of the sites.
It is not known which branch she worked at, but at one location (pictured below), on Shore Line Drive, staff told The Telegraph they had been instructed by bosses not to talk about the vice-president.
The Telegraph understands McDonald’s head office has never commented publicly on whether Ms Harris was ever an employee.
The fast food giant has sought to stay out of the debate, and in an internal memo confirmed by the Wall Street Journal it said it did not have the records to confirm Ms Harris’s claims.
“We’ve been proud to hear former president Trump’s love for McDonald’s and vice president Harris’ fond memories working under the Arches,” it said in a message on Sunday.
“We and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early 80s.”
It added that Ms Harris had been offered a visit to its restaurants by franchise owners, after Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in an attempt to show up the-vice president.
“Upon learning of the former president’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone,” the memo added.
McDonald’s was ed for comment by The Telegraph.
What has Harris said?
Ms Harris has spoken repeatedly about her time spent working at the restaurant, claiming her job there during her university degree in the 1980s inspired her to working families.
“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,” she told MSNBC last month.
“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.”
Ms Harris said she first “did fries” at the restaurant and then worked as a cashier to help pay for her law degree at the University of California.
According to Quentin Fulks, her deputy campaign manager, she worked at a branch of McDonald’s in Alameda, California during the summer of 1983, while she was a student at Howard University.
Her time at the restaurant helped her to earn a bit more spending money, Politico reported.
What has Trump said?
Ms Harris’s story has been disputed by Trump and his ers, with the former president accusing her of lying.
Ms Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s”, he told ers at a rally in Detroit on Friday .“That’s like not a big thing, but can I be honest with you, it’s terrible,” he added.
Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Trump claimed the restaurant manager had itted she had never worked there.
“I know she didn’t [work there],” the Republican candidate said. “We checked it out. They said she never worked here. She even picked the store. We went to the manager. The manager’s been there forever.”
The Trump campaign has circulated a press release promoting a story from the Washington Free Beacon, which reported that the vice president did not mention McDonald’s on her CV when applying for a job as a law clerk in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1987.
Ms Harris did not refer to the job in either of her memoirs, published in 2010 and 2019, and appears to have first revealed the job during a rally in Las Vegas in 2019.
Neither Ms Harris nor Trump have offered proof of their claims about her job at the fast food restaurant.
HIGHESTPOPORI:
America Presidential election campaign is even tougher than Nigeria,just that they have a good electoral system
It's not good. This is the only democratic system in the world where the person with the majority vote might not win.
May be they had good intentions when they came up with the system back then, but now it's not serving the intended purpose.
HIGHESTPOPORI:
The vote of the people counts that is the most important unlike what we have here
Not true.
First, there are many ways by which people's votes are not always counted.
Gerrymandering is a system by which political parties use illogical maps to create a voting block that will favor them.
Secondly, they will also try ad much as possible to dispute any vote that they know is not for their own candidates during counting.
There are many other tactics that are used to discouraged voting by certain sections of society. In fact recently, we have whites hanging around polling unit with guns claiming that they are looking for illegal voters.
I still the hanging Chad situation in Florida between Al Gore and G Bush. Thousands of voted were discarded to allow Bush to win.
I have always disliked Trump strategies because they remind me of how most gullible people fell and lost all they have during the 2015 election in Nigeria that has placed us where we ought not be..
I said this nonentity old fool is a useless Good forsaken idiot. So if Kanala worked in McDonald's and so what? Is she not better than your daughter flirting around?
Same stupid talk you will hear from morons called obidients yet many of them came from face me I face mud house.
