Like many people – ?? – I had different jobs in my teens and early 20s. I worked as an assistant, I worked at a video store (I’m dating myself), I worked at a catalog company, etc. All of those jobs were part-time and unimportant and I wouldn’t be able to “prove” that I worked at any of those places decades after the fact. Nor would I expect any of my former employers to be able to confirm that I worked there for four months in 1999. Well, Kamala Harris has spoken about working at a California McDonald’s as a summer job after her freshman year at Howard. Instead of just saying “oh, that sounds believable, okay cool,” the national media and the Republican party is obsessed with turning “Kamala lied about working at McDonald’s” into the defining issue of the campaign. This came up again because Dementia Don staged a stunt at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s over the weekend, where he played with fries and handed out bags of food to his supporters.
Piers Morgan literally wrote a NY Post column about how Kamala Harris MUST be lying about working at McDonald’s because she never included the job in her CV when she graduated from law school. Which isn’t a thing – if you’re getting a job as a lawyer, you wouldn’t include your summer job at McDonald’s on your CV. Now JD Vance is chiming in:
Sen. JD Vance said Monday that VP Kamala Harris is not facing any mainstream media scrutiny over her previous claim that she worked at McDonald’s in college. Vance called out the mainstream media for its coverage of former President Trump’s trip Sunday to a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, where he interacted with workers, served fries and greeted customers at the drive-thru.
“The fact that these people are accusing him of a ‘stage-managed’ thing… of course, the president has to have security because there have been two attempts on his life in the last eight weeks. He can’t just walk into a McDonald’s and sign a W-9 and actually go on the payroll. That’s just not how this works, especially given the security threats on his life,” he told “America’s Newsroom.”
“But look, he was interacting with people. He was talking to the employees. He was giving people food, and he was just [doing] I think what he does best, which is just being among the people, talking to them about what they care about. He showed genuine interest in the employees and their lives and where they came from and what they were actually doing in their job, and that’s something you can’t stage, and you can’t fake.”
He continued, “That is just a genuine person that Donald Trump is, and it’s why I think a lot of working people, even though, of course, he’s a successful real estate billionaire, have this emotional connection to Donald Trump, you can’t make up that kind of connection.”
He took a swipe at Vice President Harris shortly after, telling Fox News’ Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino that the Democratic nominee has “tried and failed,” to establish similar connections with voters.
“I think it’s why her campaign is flailing a little bit right now, because she goes into Sheetz and does four takes of her buying Doritos. Donald Trump just goes to McDonald’s and he is who he is and people love him,” he added.
It really is Idiocracy. We’re already there. We’ve been there for years. They’ve turned Kamala Harris’s summer job into the new Birtherism. “Why won’t Barack Obama show us his birth certificate” has become “why won’t Kamala Harris show us her McDonald’s pay stubs from the early 1980s??” And I’m sorry, but Trump’s McDonald’s stunt was hilariously stupid.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Getty.