In her 2020 presidential run, Kamala Harris said she worked at McDonald's (specifically fries and the cashier) to pay her way through school, and she's repeated the claim multiple times in the month since she became the Democratic nominee. Journalists have struggled finding records of the assertion prior to her 2020 presidential run, and the more they dig into the claim, the more evidence they find contradicting it.
Breitbart News reports:
After two decades in the public eye, which included writing two books about herself that never mentioned employment at McDonald's, all of a sudden, during that failed 2019 presidential run, the McDonald's job became a centerpiece of her campaign.
“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.”
The most damning piece of evidence that the Free Beacon unearthed comes in the form of a 1987 job application. As a second-year law student, Harris applied for “a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney's office.”
She did list a clerical job she only held for a month. She also 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 Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with questions about the McDonald's stint, and their inquiries remain unanswered.
Many suspect that the Harris campaign invented the McDonald's job in an attempt to make Kamala Harris seem relatable to the working class, and because it isn't particularly easy to definitively disprove.
Harris has written two books about her life, and neither of them reference her working at McDonald's. While the absence of an anecdote about her time working for the fast food industry in her biographies doesn't prove she's lying, it's the kind of experience politicians usually include in their biographies — especially ahead of an election.
This wouldn't be the first time the 2024 Democratic contenders found themselves in hot water for fabricating their pasts. Tim Walz has faced intense scrutiny for misrepresenting his military rank and service, a DUI he pretended was a “misunderstanding” based on service-related hearing loss, and claiming to have been awarded by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce.
The campaign has also been accused of telling more serious and consequential lies, as both candidates have progressive records, but insist they'll adopt a more moderate approach if elected, while refusing to actually lay out a concrete policy or take substantive questions from the press.