Harris campaign ‘debated for weeks’ how to respond to Free Beacon report on candidate’s alleged McDonald’s gig
While a Washington Free Beacon investigation found no evidence that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s, an alleged summer job that the failed presidential nominee tried to make a centerpiece of her campaign biography, a new book from a trio of mainstream media reporters has concluded that Harris toiled under the golden arches for “two or three weeks.”
The Free Beacon report led Trump to raise questions on the campaign trail about whether Harris was embellishing her biography. “She never worked at McDonald’s but it was a big part of her résumé,” Trump said at a campaign rally in September.
The ordeal sent the Harris campaign into a tailspin, according to 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, who omit any mention of the Free Beacon.
Harris’s aides “debated for weeks whether they should respond to Trump’s attacks about McDonald’s,” they write, and “spent weeks agonizing” about the decision.
Trump eventually orchestrated a made-for-TV appearance at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s, where he manned the fryer and greeted supporters from the drive-thru window. The Harris campaign was dissuaded from pushing back because “the facts were not especially favorable.” The book’s authors assert without evidence that Harris worked at an Alameda, Calif., McDonald’s in the summer of 1983 for “two or three weeks.”
Harris’s allegedly short stint on the job meant “most advisers didn’t want to lean into her time at McDonald’s, but it polled well,” so Harris did it anyway. When questions emerged, the campaign considered deploying Harris’s sister “for a feature story with a lifestyle magazine, but others viewed the story as too risky.”
At one point, the campaign caught wind “that at least one major mainstream news outlet was investigating” Harris’s McDonald’s employment, according to the book. The revelation caused “alarm inside the campaign,” which “agreed on a statement rehashing her past comments about her time at McDonald’s.”
When the New York Times covered the brouhaha in October, noting that the Free Beacon’s report “seems to have propelled” Trump to “claim [Harris] made up the job,” they compared the Free Beacon report to birtherism.
CNN’s Brian Stelter characterized the fracas this way: “Harris shared this and then a pro-Trump website started to talk about, ‘Hey, is there evidence, is there proof she worked at McDonald’s, there’s no records, there’s no receipts.'” He concluded, “I find that bewildering.”
Stelter’s remarks came after Harris touted the job during an April 2024 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, saying, “I did the fries. And then I did the cashier.”
When Trump himself “did the fries,” Harris watched a video of her rival’s campaign stop and “told aides he was doing it wrong,” the book reveals. “An aide suggested she could point that out in an interview, but she never did.” The campaign also turned down an invitation to visit an Atlanta-area McDonald’s because “aides didn’t want her to visit a restaurant and look like she was copycatting.”
Days before the election, the Daily Mail released a poll showing that nearly 60 percent of Americans held some doubt that Harris really worked at McDonald’s. Trump’s short stint as a fry cook, meanwhile, became the most known story of the election cycle, an Echelon Insights poll found.
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