BarcelonaWith almost two weeks to go before the US elections, Donald Trump sees how the polls are smiling at him and he is closing in on his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. The two candidates for the White House are neck and neck in the polls, which portend the tightest American elections in many years, and the former president is clinging to any resource to continue winning support. It is in this context that this Sunday he moved his campaign to a McDonald’s restaurant in the key state of Pennsylvania.
Trump has stopped at the location of the franchise, located on the outskirts of Philadelphia, put on his apron and was working for a few minutes at the restaurant, where he cooked fries and served them to some customers through the drive-thru window. Behind this peculiar campaign act was a new attack on Harris, whom the Republican candidate accuses of having invented that he had worked at a McDonald’s when he was young.
“I love McDonald’s. I love the jobs. And I think it’s inappropriate for someone to say everywhere that they worked at a McDonald’s […] when he never worked there – Trump said. I love this job, I think I will come back,” he added.
According to the Harris campaign, the vice president worked during the summer of 1983 at a McDonald’s in the city of Albereda (California), precisely cooking fries and tending the cash register. All this to pay for her studies at Howard University, in Washington, as the candidate usually explains to show proximity to the working classes and to distance herself from Trump, who inherited her father’s empire.
The Republican, who is a heavy consumer of fast food and in 2019 went as far as handing out McDonald’s burgers at a White House event, has repeatedly accused Harris without evidence of having made up that part of his resume. Ian Sams, spokesman for the Democrat, responded this Sunday that he is lying out of desperation: “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because they gave him millions on a silver platter and then he wasted them,” he replied.
Harris does not mention his experience at McDonald’s in his memoirs and, according to the Efe agency, the first time he would have spoken about it in public would have been in his first presidential campaign in 2019, when he joined the striking workers of this company in Las Vegas. McDonald’s has declined to respond to several requests for information from US media seeking to confirm whether Harris worked at the restaurant 40 years ago.
Trump, of course, has a long history of spreading falsehoods about the past of his political rivals. In fact, he was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama (2009-2017) was born in Kenya and was therefore barred by the US Constitution from being president.
