Oct. 20 (UPI) — With the presidential race coming down to several swing states, former president and GOP hopeful Donald Trump donned an apron, served up fries and held a impromptu press conference in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday.
He handed customers food through the window, told them he made it himself and that he would cover the bill.
Online video of the staged event taken from behind Trump showed customers pulling through the drive-thru and accepting food from the former president, and then a swarm of reporters with cameras and microphones shouting questions.
Trump manned a frying machine at McDonald’s similar to the one that Vice President and Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris said she worked at as a young woman in California and again as a graduate student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1983.
Harris released that and other biographical details during her first campaign for president, an apparent attempt to bolster her working class credentials and garner votes from working and middle class people in this campaign, too.
She also referred to her employment at McDonald’s on Drew Barrymore‘s talk show, and joined the fast food company’s striking workers on the picket line in 2019.
Trump’s penchant for McDonald’s is also well known and dates back to his first presidential run. His interest in Harris’s employment at McDonald’s and the role it plays in her political narrative seems to have taken on an outsize role in Trump’s campaign with just a few weeks left before Election Day.
Trump has repeatedly questioned the veracity of Harris’ claim of employment at McDonald’s and has accused the vice president, without evidence, of making it up.
“I’m looking for a job,” Trump told the owner of the McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, Pa., on Sunday. “And I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phony story,” he alleged of Harris’s employment record. The vice president has largely ignored Trump’s statements.
Her time as a McDonald’s employee has become a prominent part of the political narrative in this election dating back to the Democratic National Convention, when it seemed to take on a life of its own.
Former President Bill Clinton joked that Harris would “break my record as the president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.
“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s?” said Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”
Trump has suggested that while her employment record as a younger person working to make ends meet may seem insignificant, he has argued otherwise, and that it should not be dismissed.
“We would say, well, that’s not a big lie. It’s a huge lie,” Trump has said in recent interviews,” because McDonald’s was part of her whole thing.”
During the network’s recent interview with Harris, Donald Trump Jr. criticized Fox News for not asking Harris which McDonald’s she worked at earlier in her life.
Seeming to embrace his father’s penchant for the fast food chain rather than become defensive, Trump, Jr. said that his father’s knowledge of the McDonald’s menu far surpasses hers.
“I think my father knows the McDonald’s menu much better than Kamala Harris ever did,” Trump Jr. said.
