By some estimates, nearly one in seven Americans have flipped burgers or managed the drive-through window at McDonald’s during their career. Vice President Kamala Harris counts herself among them, but a batch of new public records say otherwise.
Since launching her 2019 presidential campaign, the Democrat has often mentioned that working for the world’s most recognizable fast food brand was her first job after her freshman year in college. “I did fries,” she recently admitted on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” adding, “and then I did the cashier.” The Washington Free Beacon scoured Harris’s past public statements on her work history and pinpointed the first time she mentioned a summer job at McDonald’s during a labor rally in Las Vegas that year. “I was working in a McDonald’s,” she told the enthusiastic crowd. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times dutifully reported, without attributino, that Harris “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.”
(VOTE: Are You Supporting TRUMP Or KAMALA In November?)
Cracks in the story began to appear earlier this month when Politico noted that the Harris campaign amended one of her first ads which originally said that she took the job at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. The ad was reintroduced to reflect that “she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money,” according to the outlet. The Beacon dug further, confirming that neither of Harris’s two memoirs – published in 2010 and 2019 – mention her brief stint under the golden arches. The summer job was similarly unmentioned in her 2009 book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” and Stacey Johnson-Batiste, who chronicled Harris’s rise for a 2021 autobiography, confirmed she had never heard about her subject taking a job at McDonald’s.
But the proverbial levee broke when the outlet obtained a copy of a young Harris’s job application from 1987, the year she would have completed her first year in college. At the time, Harris was in the middle of law school and applying for a position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. Her employment history went into granular detail, even listing a monthlong position at a stock brokerage, as the application required her to list every job she ever held over the past 10 years. There is no mention of McDonald’s.
Harris, a second-year student at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, touts her cosmopolitanism, citing “extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe” and “lived in Montreal, Canada for six years,” but makes no mention of McDonald’s.
Records obtained by the Beacon:
<!–
backup code
backup creatives
–>
The rush to relate with regular Americans is a time-honored tradition among the nation’s most prominent politicians. Former President Barack Obama touted his time serving scoops of ice cream as a young man in Honolulu, working for Baskin-Robbins in a role that he said taught him the value of hard work. In that case, heavy media coverage and photographic evidence proved the former president was telling the truth. In the case of Harris, no evidence has been turned up that she ever took the menial labor job she claims. Neither the Harris campaign nor McDonald’s returned messages by the Beacon seeking comment.
Fibs, half-truths, and misleading claims have pockmarked the rollout of the Harris campaign and the introduction of running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The midwestern Democrat has had difficulty telling the truth about his military record, his favorite foods, and his family’s struggle to have children. Harris and Walz will sit together on Thursday night for their first unscripted interview with CNN.
(FREE RED HAT: “Impeached. Arrested. Convicted. Shot. Still Standing”)
