During her 2019 presidential campaign, then-U.S. Senator Kamala Harris unexpectedly revealed a personal anecdote: she had worked at a McDonald’s while pursuing her college education.
Despite being in the public eye for over twenty years and having authored two books about her life that did not mention her McDonald’s employment, this detail suddenly became a focal point of her campaign during her unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2019.
“I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?” inquired a fawning Drew Barrymore during Harris’s appearance on Barrymore’s daytime talk show in 2019.
“I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s,” confirmed Harris. “When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier.”
A wide-eyed Barrymore responded, “I didn’t know that about you.”
An intriguing mystery unfolds: One must ponder the source from which Barrymore allegedly “heard” that “rumor.” With the current Vice President Kamala Harris now in the race for the presidency, she has persisted in asserting this claim.
Far-left Politico quickly gushed over it:
“The ad’s narration asserted that Harris worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. But that wasn’t quite right: She really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money. The ad was quickly re-cut, just another wrinkle to iron out amid a fast-moving presidential campaign that has reconstituted itself around a new nominee. But the mix-up aside, aides agreed about what they saw as a small but important piece of Harris’ backstory: They wanted voters to know she worked at McDonald’s.”
Kamala’s assertion is currently under significant examination, primarily due to the diligent reporting conducted by the Washington Free Beacon. Despite thorough attempts to substantiate the claim regarding the McDonald’s position, the Free Beacon has uncovered no evidence to support CacklyMcNeverBorderCzar’s statement.
“It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s,” reports the Free Beacon. “But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions[.]”
“On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that after a move to Canada, 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.” But, the Free Beacon adds, “Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.”
“If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.”
There is no reference to this summer employment in either of her memoirs—one released in 2010 and the other in 2019. The most incriminating evidence discovered by the Free Beacon is a job application from 1987. At that time, Harris was a second-year law student applying for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office.
This application mandated that the applicant provide a comprehensive list of all positions held in the preceding decade. Notably, Harris did not include her employment at McDonald’s, which would have been within the ten-year timeframe.
She listed “granular life experience[s] on her résumé—‘extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe’ and ‘lived in Montreal, Canada for six years’—but not McDonald’s.”
The Free Beacon has indicated that it has sought clarification from the Harris campaign regarding her employment at McDonald’s; however, after a period of two weeks, no response has been received. The assertion made by The Free Beacon is valid. It is possible that Harris did indeed have a tenure at McDonald’s. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that two media outlets, which claim to uphold rigorous journalistic standards—namely, the left-leaning Politico and the left-leaning New York Times—have reported on a matter that is significant to a presidential candidate’s background without apparent verification.
Even if it is ultimately revealed that Harris has misrepresented her McDonald’s employment, the media may dismiss this as inconsequential, suggesting that an individual who is willing to fabricate details about trivial matters may also be inclined to misrepresent more significant issues, such as her policy stances on fracking bans, electric vehicle mandates, the expansion of the southern border, and the potential elimination of private insurance through a Medicare for All initiative.
