It\u2019s one of those little biographical details meant to flavor how voters view a candidate, not to define them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about it. Two middle-class kids,\u201d Vice President Kamala Harris said of the Democratic ticket at a rally last month. \u201cOne, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother. I had a summer job at McDonald\u2019s. The other, a son of the Nebraska Plains who grew up working on a farm. Think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her opponent in this year\u2019s presidential election, by contrast, is a rich guy who grew up rich. Until he moved to the White House, the only place Donald Trump ever worked was for the private company that shares his name. He never worked on a farm, or at McDonald\u2019s. You understand the point.<\/p>\n
In recent days, though, it\u2019s not Harris who\u2019s been talking about her job at McDonald\u2019s \u2014 it\u2019s Trump. Because, according to the (notoriously unreliable) former president, she never worked at McDonald\u2019s at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s a liar. She doesn\u2019t work at McDonald\u2019s. She said she worked at McDonald\u2019s, right?\u201d Trump said at a rally in Arizona this month. \u201cRight? She worked at McDonald\u2019s. And she was working so hard. There\u2019s only one problem. She didn\u2019t work at McDonald\u2019s. She\u2019s a liar.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said she worked and she grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald\u2019s,\u201d Trump said in Pennsylvania on Monday. \u201cIt was such \u2014 she never worked there! And these fake news reports will never report it. They don\u2019t want to report it because they\u2019re fake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump claimed at a news conference earlier this month that \u201cthe only one that reported it was Fox.\u201d In Pennsylvania, he claimed that reporters had gone to McDonald\u2019s restaurants and asked, being told \u201cwe don\u2019t know who the hell she is.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are no news articles on Fox\u2019s website detailing any investigation. Fox News host Jesse Watters did mention having reached out to both McDonald\u2019s and the Harris campaign this month, without success. Trump\u2019s story about current McDonald\u2019s employees not knowing who the vice president was and not knowing about the employment history of someone who\u2019d worked at their store 40 years ago does not seem to have any basis in reality.<\/p>\n
Over the course of this week, I spent some time looking into the story myself \u2014 not because I doubted Harris\u2019s claim (since there\u2019s no real reason to doubt it) but because I was curious if it was provable.<\/p>\n
Harris has indicated that she worked at a restaurant in Alameda \u2014 an island on the east side of the San Francisco Bay \u2014 during the summer of 1983. Over at the Alameda-focused discussion board on Reddit, there was some discussion about which restaurant that would have been, the one on Central Avenue or the one on Shore Line Drive. Consensus seemed to be the former, since it wasn\u2019t clear whether the latter existed at the time.<\/p>\n
I called both, without success. Again, unsurprisingly: This was 40 years ago. I also discovered that both restaurants are owned by members of the same family. My call to them was not returned, even when I touted the potential historic nature of their franchises. Then I reached out to McDonald\u2019s corporate, both to the company and to the company\u2019s archivist (which, as an aside, seems like a very interesting job). No dice.<\/p>\n
Technically, then, the claim exists within the formal parameter of \u201cunproven,\u201d which is what the fact-checking site Snopes has granted it. But it might just as well exist as \u201cunprovable,\u201d barring some release of records from the Social Security Administration.<\/p>\n
The year 1983 exists on the other side of a digital curtain, in the Analog Dark Ages. It was a time when everything everyone did can\u2019t simply be summoned up at will by people with access to a web browser. Had Harris foiled a burglary while working at the store, maybe it would have made it into a newspaper and been digitized into an online database. (I didn\u2019t find any such article.) Maybe if she were an exceptional employee, it would have ended up in some McDonald\u2019s marketing material somewhere. (Same.) But if she was just a college kid earning some extra money one summer? In the eyes of the internet, it\u2019s like it didn\u2019t even exist.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Trump seeks to exploit. It\u2019s possible that he simply doesn\u2019t understand what a summer job at McDonald\u2019s entails \u2014 to Harris\u2019s original point \u2014 and thinks that this should be provable somehow. Either way, it\u2019s clear that he wants to leverage the murkiness, using it as so many demonstrably false claims have been leveraged against him. After all, his point in describing Harris as a \u201cliar\u201d in Arizona wasn\u2019t to focus on the McDonald\u2019s job but to use it to bolster his claim that she was similarly \u201clying\u201d about issues related to abortion. He\u2019s using a seemingly nebulous biographical detail to undermine Harris \u2014 precisely what he did with his claims about Barack Obama\u2019s birthplace.<\/p>\n
Since Trump has been saying that the McDonald\u2019s story isn\u2019t true, a lot of his supporters are saying it too, rushing to prove that Harris was being dishonest about her McDonald\u2019s employment with the same intellectual rigor that they applied to uncovering voter fraud and pet eating.<\/p>\n
For example: Many Harris critics have suggested that it is weird that Harris wouldn\u2019t have mentioned this detail previously. The Washington Free Beacon obtained a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 Harris submitted for a job at the district attorney\u2019s office in 1987, noting that McDonald\u2019s was missing. Suspicious! Instead, the single-page document listed her work as a law clerk, an assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and her internship with former California senator Alan Cranston.<\/p>\n
Curious whether this was odd, I asked my sister \u2014 who, during high school in the late 1980s, worked at \u201cThe World\u2019s Most Magnificent McDonald\u2019s\u201d \u2014 whether she included that employment on her r\u00e9sum\u00e9.<\/p>\n
\u201cHa-ha,\u201d she replied over text. \u201cI don\u2019t believe so, no.\u201d Maybe when she was first out of college, she said, \u201cbut certainly not as a professional.\u201d<\/p>\n
Intending no disrespect to my sister, her experience just out of college also did not include work as a law clerk or for a U.S. senator.<\/p>\n
During an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday, Harris was asked about her McDonald\u2019s job by host Stephanie Ruhle: Had she worked at McDonald\u2019s?<\/p>\n
\u201cI have,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n
Ruhle tried to move on, but Harris drilled down.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald\u2019s is because there are people who work at McDonald\u2019s in our country who are trying to raise a family \u2014 I worked there as a student, I was a kid \u2014 who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another difference is that Harris, unlike Trump, has earned the benefit of the doubt on assertions that may not be immediately provable.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of those little biographical details meant to flavor how voters view a candidate, not to define them. \u201cThink about it. Two middle-class kids,\u201d Vice President Kamala Harris said of the Democratic ticket at a rally last month. \u201cOne, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother. I had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}