(The Center Square) – A Philadelphia-area McDonald’s onboarded a new worker on Sunday: former President Donald Trump.
The Republican nominee’s campaign shared footage of an employee at the Feasterville location in Bucks County training Trump, a black and yellow apron shielding his trademark red tie, how to cook the restaurant’s iconic French fries.
In separate clips, Trump serves customers waiting at the drive-thru window and pays their bills out of his own pocket.
“I’m going for a job right now at McDonald’s,” Trump, known as a frequent patron of the fast-food chain himself, told reporters after he deboarded a plane in Philadelphia earlier Sunday. “I’ve really wanted to do this all my life and now I’m going to do it, because she didn’t do it.”
The “she” in question is Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee also vying for the White House in November. The story of the candidate’s humble beginnings, as the child of divorced parents living in Oakland, includes a brief stint working at McDonald’s during college – a fact she touted often in her failed bid for president in 2019 – possibly while at Howard University, possibly in the Bay Area.
She tweeted about it June 14, 2019. Fact-checking news outlets, including Snopes, could not confirm the claim then or today.
The Trump campaign isn’t buying.
“We have checked with McDonald’s and they say, definitively, that there is no record of Lyin’ Kamala Harris ever having worked there,” Trump’s campaign said on X. “In other words, she never worked there, and has lied about this job for years.”
Multiple media reports allege management at the Alameda, Calif., restaurant won’t respond to questions about the authenticity of Harris’ employment there four decades ago.
Of note, the Trump campaign has not offered any proof to dispute Harris’ claims beyond his reported conversations with unnamed McDonald’s employees. The Democratic nominee’s campaign also shoots down the claim as a “desperate” attack on her character.
“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie,” Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams told to U.S. News & World Report on Sunday. “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.”
In Pennsylvania, widely viewed as the most pivotal swing state in the 2024 election, the contest between Harris and Trump has been neck-and-neck for weeks. In the most recent RealClear Politics polling average of surveys conducted through Oct. 17, the former president holds a 0.7 percentage point lead in Pennsylvania. Only in Wisconsin and North Carolina are his margins smaller.
Of note, although Harris leads nationally by 0.9 percentage points, Trump leads in all seven swing states by an average of 1 percentage point, according to RealClear.