Trump visiting McDonald’s while offering no evidence for saying Harris didn’t work there in college

FEASTERVILLE-TREVOSE, Pa. (AP) — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump visited a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday as he stepped up his criticism of Democrat Kamala Harris and dug into his claim, spread without offering evidence, that she never worked at the fast-food chain while in college.

The former president visited a McDonalds in Feasterville-Trevose, which is part of Bucks County, a swing area northeast of Philadelphia. Harris has talked during her campaign about her experiences as a fry cook at McDonalds and Trump planned to try his hand before heading to an evening town hall in Lancaster before attending the Pittsburgh Steelers home game against the New York Jets.

The McDonald’s owner, Derek Giacomantonio said, “It is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community.”

He said in a statement that was why he accepted Trump’s request “to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”

As Trump put it reporters when he got off his plane: “I’m going for a job right now at McDonald’s,” before adding, “I really wanted to do this all my life.”

Trump has fixated in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she held in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while attending Howard University in Washington. Trump says the vice president never worked there, the latest example of his longtime strategy to seize on conspiracy theories and question the credentials of his political opponents.

Trump repeated the claim Friday night at a campaign rally in Detroit, saying Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s.”

“That’s like not a big thing, but can I be honest with you, it’s terrible,” he said.

Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s he was visiting and cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.

Harris, who was a California prosecutor before becoming a senator and vice president, raises her McDonald’s experience as a way to show she understands working-class struggles.

“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie,” Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams said 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 an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college.

“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”

Harris also said: “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs.”

Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters on Saturday that Trump would be making the stop “so that one candidate in this race can actually have worked at McDonald’s.”

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“Since Kamala Harris has not, President Trump by the end of tomorrow will have worked at McDonald’s. He’ll have done fries more than Kamala Harris ever has,” Miller said. “I think it shows he connects with hard-working Americans.”

Harris’ campaign did not immediately have a comment on Trump’s McDonald’s plan.

Representatives for McDonald’s did not respond to a message about whether the company had employment records for one of its restaurants 40 years ago.

Trump has promoted false and baseless claims throughout his campaign

It’s far from the first time that Trump has promoted baseless claims. Most notably, he claims falsely that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden due to voter fraud. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.

Trump has long gone after opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities.

Before he ran for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not an American citizen and therefore was ineligible to be president. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.

During his first run for president, Trump repeated a tabloid’s claims that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, who was born in Cuba, had links to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump competed for the party’s 2016 nomination.

In January of this year, when Trump was facing Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, in the Republican primary, he shared on his social media network a post with false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she was born, therefore making her ineligible to be president.

Haley is the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, making her automatically a native-born citizen and meeting the constitutional requirement to run for president.

Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on the claims about McDonald’s four decades ago is a “puzzling detour,” but that Trump is “not above throwing anything on the wall to see if it sticks.”

“When Donald Trump isn’t talking about the economy and illegal immigration, he’s off topic about the things that people care about,” Marson said.

Marson suggested that Trump would be better off talking about the economy and immigration, not something he called “off topic.”

“I don’t think there’s an undecided voter out there that will respond or that will make their decision based on whether or not Kamala Harris actually worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s,” Marson said.