Trump will visit McDonald’s as he offers no evidence for saying Harris didn’t work there in college
LATROBE, Pa. — LATROBE, Pa. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump He 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 did worked at the fast food chain during his studies.
His plan on Sunday is to visit a McDonald’s and work on the fryer before going to an evening town hall in Lancaster and then attending the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home game against the New York Jets.
The former president has focused in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she had in college, where she worked the cash register and made fries at McDonald’s while attending Howard University in Washington. Trump has claimed that the vice president never worked there, the latest example of his years-long strategy of seizing on conspiracy theories and questioning the credentials of his political opponents.
Trump repeated the claim Friday evening at a campaign rally in Detroit, saying Harris “lied about his work at McDonald’s.”
“That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I can be honest: it’s terrible,” Trump said.
Harris, who was a prosecutor in California before becoming a senator and vice president, brings up her McDonald’s experience as a way to show she understands the struggles of the working class.
In an interview last month on MSNBC, she pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she worked at the fast-food chain 40 years ago when she was still in college.
“Part of the reason I talk about working at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country and 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 to meet those needs.”
Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters on Saturday that Trump would drop out “so that one candidate in this race can actually have worked at McDonald’s.”
“Since Kamala Harris didn’t do that, President Trump will have been working at McDonald’s by the end of tomorrow. He must have made more fries than Kamala Harris ever did,” Miller said. “I think it shows that he connects with hard-working Americans.”
Harris’ campaign had no immediate comment on Trump’s McDonald’s plan.
McDonald’s representatives did not respond to a message about whether the company had employment records for any of its restaurants 40 years ago.
This is far from the first time that Trump has promoted baseless claims. Most notably, he falsely claims he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden because of voter fraud. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.
Trump has long gone after opponents based on their personal history, especially women and racial minorities.
Before running for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed that President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to become president. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first bid 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 battled for the party’s 2016 nomination.
In January this year, when Trump faced Nikki Haley, his former UN ambassador, in the Republican primaries, he shared a post on his social media with false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she was born, leaving her out of was eligible. be president.
Haley is the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, making her an automatic native-born citizen and meeting the constitutional requirements to run for president.
Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on McDonald’s claims from four decades ago is a “puzzling detour” but that Trump “will not shy away from putting something on the wall.” throw it to see if it sticks.”
“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, and not something he called “off-topic.”
“I don’t think there’s an undecided voter who will respond or make their decision based on whether Kamala Harris actually worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s,” Marson said.