Trump is pushing McDonald's onto the political stage in the final days of the campaign

CNN
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Donald Trump is dragging one of America's best-known companies – McDonald's – onto the political stage in the final days of his third bid for the White House.

The former president is expected to stop by one of the fast food chain's franchises in Pennsylvania during his Sunday tour of the Keystone State. He wants to work there as a fry attendant, as CNN reported last week.

It's the same job that Vice President Kamala Harris said she held as a young woman, a biographical detail revealed during her first presidential campaign. Since then, it has become a centerpiece of the story about middle-class origins that has made her a key plank of her campaign as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

Trump, whose deep affection for the Golden Arches and their offerings is well documented, has become fixated on Harris' employment there. In interviews and during the campaign, he regularly accuses Harris – without evidence – of having invented the factoid. His visit to the restaurant is his latest attempt to sow doubts about the Democrat's professional past.

“I go to McDonald's to eat fries,” Trump told his supporters at a rally in the Pittsburgh area on Saturday. “I think I'll do it tomorrow, and I think it'll be at a place in Pennsylvania, and I'll be standing next to the french fries.”

Harris has largely ignored Trump, as well as calls from his supporters and requests from conservative news outlets to provide evidence of her time there. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Trump's allegations and his upcoming visit to McDonald's.

A campaign official told CNN that Harris worked at a McDonald's in Alameda, California, in the summer of 1983, while she was a student at Howard University in Washington. According to the officer, she worked the cash register and operated the frying and ice cream machines.

On Drew Barrymore's talk show earlier this year, Harris told the actor: “I made fries. And then I took over the cash register.” And as a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris mentioned her work at the fast-food chain while joining striking McDonald's workers on the strike line.

Her time there was mentioned repeatedly on stage at the Democratic National Convention this summer, as her allies compared her upbringing to Trump's upper-class roots. Former President Bill Clinton joked that Harris would “break my record as a president who spent the most time at McDonald's.” Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett claimed that “one candidate worked at McDonald's” while “the other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”

“Can you just imagine Donald Trump working at McDonald's?” said Harris' vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”

Trump has repeatedly questioned the biographies of his rivals over the years, often without justification. He was one of the loudest voices in the debunked “Birther” movement, which falsely questioned Barack Obama's citizenship and suitability for the White House and ultimately led the Hawaii-born president to release his lengthy birth certificate. During the 2016 Republican primary, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that Senator Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This election cycle, Trump falsely suggested that his Republican primary opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was not a native-born U.S. citizen and falsely claimed that Harris had only recently embraced her black heritage.

Yet even as Trump made these accusations, he littered his personal story with exaggerations and fabrications. In his best-selling autobiography, The Art of the Deal, he coined the phrase “truthful exaggeration,” a contradictory term that nevertheless illustrates his relationship to facts about himself.

“It is a harmless form of exaggeration,” he wrote, “and a very effective form of advertising.”

During a deposition in 2007, lawyers caught Trump lying at least 30 times in two days, mostly about banal facts about his companies such as the size of his workforce, a payment for speaking fees and the cost of his golf membership. He also once claimed that he stood on the rubble of Ground Zero after the September 11 terrorist attacks and that he paid his workers to clear the rubble, although this is not supported by public records.

And there are multiple reports of Trump calling reporters under the pseudonym “John Barron,” an alleged executive at his company who once tricked a Forbes reporter into inflating Trump's fortune on the magazine's list of richest people.

It's unclear why Trump held on to Harris's job at McDonald's or why a visit there on one of his few remaining weekends before Election Day was warranted. But in recent interviews, Trump has suggested that a small detail about his rival's past shouldn't be ignored.

“We would say, well, that’s not a big lie. “That's a huge lie,” Trump said, “because McDonald's was part of their whole thing.”

Trump also visited a McDonald's early in his presidential campaign, this time in East Palestine, Ohio, after a train carrying hazardous materials derailed there, sparking an environmental and health crisis. There he joked to a woman working the cash register: “I know this menu better than you. I probably know better than anyone here.”

The former president has long expressed his affinity for fast food. During a CNN town hall in 2016, Trump, who describes himself as a “very clean person,” attributed his fondness for their offerings to quality control, saying, “It's better to go there than to go somewhere you can.” “has no idea where the food is.” comes from.”

“I think the food is good. I think I can live with all these places, Burger King, McDonald's,” he added. “The other night I had Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not the worst thing in the world.”

Trump brought that affection to the White House, where he once served Clemson's national football team a smorgasbord of burgers and pizza. His son-in-law Jared Kushner joked in his autobiography that he knew Trump had turned a corner in his fight against the coronavirus when he requested his favorite order from McDonald's.

“McDonald's Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake,” Kushner said.

During an appearance on Fox News last week, Donald Trump Jr. complained that the network didn't ask her which McDonald's she worked at in its interview with Harris. He also claimed that his father's familiarity with the chain's offerings would surpass that of the Democratic candidate.

“I think my dad knows the McDonald's menu a lot better than Kamala Harris ever did,” Trump Jr. said.

CNN's Kristen Holmes, Kate Sullivan and Ebony Davis contributed to this story.