Kamala Harris Did Not Put McDonalds Job On Her Lawyering Resumé And The Washington Free Beacon Is ON IT

McScandal!

Photo by Jurij Kenda on Unsplash

As Donald Trump slips and slips in the polls, conservative pundits and publications are getting more and more desperate when it comes to trying to find something to use against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz that can actually stick. Perhaps that is why the Washington Free Beacon assigned not one, not two, but three reporters to its story about whether or not Kamala Harris really worked at McDonald’s — the implication being that she lied about this in order to get some kind of working class street cred.

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Their McEvidence? Well, for one, they can’t find any instances of her talking about it publicly before she ran for president in 2019.

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she "was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s."

It’s true. The Beacon obtained a job application she filled out for a job as a law clerk in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in which she did not mention her brief career as a french fry chef in any of the three spaces given for previous jobs —  choosing to only mention more “relevant” jobs instead.

What an odd thing to do! I mean, I know that I always put “Sales Associate at Wet Seal” on all of my writing-related resumés, because what publication isn’t interested in how many backless sequin tops I sold my senior year of high school? I also always include “Third Key at Afterthoughts,” because maybe they would prefer to hire someone who could also pierce ears? This is all very important for people to know.

Surely the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office would at least like to have been asked if they would like fries with that?

The Free Beacon also notes that her mother was a cancer researcher, in order to imply that Harris would not have had to work during college at all, even during the summer. The average cancer researcher today makes $134,039 a year, which is a good salary, but probably not a “put two kids through college without them needing to have jobs, ever” salary.

Snopes, which we all know has gotten a bit weird, labels Harris’s McDonald’s work experience as a “Research In Progress”:

Aside from the above-mentioned news reports, there was no tangible evidence of Harris working at McDonald's as a college student. We reached out to Harris' campaign, as well as McDonald's headquarters, seeking such proof — which could include photos or videos of her working at the restaurant, employment records or physical items such as a uniform or name tag. We also looked for public interviews by friends or family members of Harris' to confirm the story, with no luck. 

Oh yeah, because these are things we all keep from our summer jobs as teenagers, right? And surely lots of people brought their giant camcorders to work every day in 1981, just as we bring our phones around now, so why wouldn’t there be video? Surely if she really did work there, someone, somewhere, would have a big pile of VHS tapes of Kamala Harris frying up french fries.

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I don’t know anyone who could produce the kind of evidence these people require to prove they worked at a fast food restaurant or a mall store or whatever when they were teenagers or in college. I certainly couldn’t. I can remember literally two names of people I worked with during those years and one of them is just “Tanya.” And I worked there far more recently than Harris worked at McDonald’s. I am also quite certain that there are no employment records anywhere that I would be able to locate.

Anyone who ever worked one of these jobs knows and understands all of this and they’re obviously just using it to make it look as though Harris is lying about having worked at McDonald’s in order to McConnect with working class people under false pretenses. Unfortunately for them, they don’t have any proof either.