Fox’s Lawrence Jones Falsely Claims Kamala Harris Only Talked About Her McDonalds Job After Getting the Nomination

It’s not surprising that Fox & Friends would delight in former President Donald Trump’s bizarre photo op at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s this weekend, but how they covered it was so craven and filled with misinformation that it merits a call out.

The Trump campaign shut down a Bucks County McDonald’s franchise so that the Republican nominee could be captured on video dressed in McDonald’s attire, learning how the fries are made and running the drive-thru, though not with real customers, but with Secret Service cleared individuals who had been pre-selected and even rehearsed their interaction.

Of course, Fox & Friends more than took the bait; they openly amplified the cynical ploy of a self-professed billionaire spending 15-30 minutes in front of cameras as a means to show he’s in touch with the working-class voters, all the while saving he was “working” at the McDonald’s. He was not; he was doing a very cynical and carefully staged photo op, the very sort that Fox & Friends enjoy calling out when a Democratic politician is at play.

The reason for Trump spending time at a swing state McDonald’s was made clear when he told reporters that he had now worked there longer than Vice President Kamala Harris has, trying to ridicule her past assertion that she worked at an Alameda County McDonald’s in 1983 — a relatively anodyne comment that has become the weirdest controversial flashpoint in the 2024 election.

“She’s a liar. She doesn’t work at McDonald’s. She said she worked at McDonald’s, right?” Trump said at a rally in Arizona in September, “Right? She worked at McDonald’s. And she was working so hard. There’s only one problem. She didn’t work at McDonald’s. She’s a liar.”

There are no records of Harris working at that job, and the Washington Examiner has raised questions about the veracity of the claim, noting that she did not list it on a resume while applying for a legal job, which suggests that legal jobs require some counter work at a fast food chain. So Trump insists that Harris lied about the job, and Fox & Friends appeared to take that position wholesale, neglecting just how difficult it is to prove one worked at a fast food job 41 years ago.

Fox & Friends pushed hard on the notion that she lied about the job, even citing a New York Times report that revealed the challenges of finding any evidence of her work experience, but also sharing some evidence in support, which Fox & Friends not only ignored but openly misinformed their audience about.

To wit, Lawrence Jones paraded his ignorance on the issue by bringing up the New York Times article but entirely misreporting what it included.

“First of all, The New York Times did an entire investigation,” Jones said. “ The New York Times investigative unit, they went to the store. And McDonald’s is known for keeping really good records. So they talked with people that were during that period of time. No one knows, they talk with friends…” he trailed off, neglecting to mention this part of the Times report :

But The New York Times interviewed a friend who had known Ms. Harris as a teenager and remained in touch with the family for years afterward. Wanda Kagan , a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.

Jones continued, saying: “Apparently she started she didn’t mention this back in 2019 when she was running for president. But apparently when she got the nomination, she started talking about this. And no one has been able to verify this. But if if this was the true story, she should have did it before him. Now, you got the rich guy serving on McDonald’s and it just makes her look bad. “

Again, this is not true. That very New York Times article cites an AP report from 2019 in which Harris spoke publicly about working at McDonald’s. AP reported :

Harris said she worked at McDonald’s when she was a student and “did the french fries and the ice cream,” but noted “there was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month.”

Did Kamala Harris work at a McDonald’s? I don’t really know the answer. It’s possible that she made that story up out of whole cloth, but it seems far more likely that the lack of evidence reveals nothing other than there being no pay slips or tax forms from when none of this was digital and 40 years ago. Washington Post’s Philip Bump has a good perspective on the Quixotic task of locating data from a pre-digital world.

I worked at several fast food places from 1982 through 1984, including Sub & Stuff, The Chartroose Caboose, and Dairy Queen. However, I couldn’t find any evidence that I held those jobs other than family members and close friends vouching for me.

Absence of evidence does not prove evidence of absence. But none of this matters to the very pro-Trump Fox & Friends , who are more committed to promoting Donald Trump’s bonkers photo op than telling the viewers the facts.

Harrumph.

Watch above via Fox News.