I never served in the military, but I did serve under the Golden Arches at McDonald’s. Kamala Harris apparently did neither, based on the available evidence, and her recent claims to be a fry cook in college seem to be the fast-food version of stolen valor.
You would think a socialist senator who worked at McDonald’s would make her fast-food experience a defining episode in her political memoir, not to mention a staple of her multiple campaigns in California’s Bay Area. But her stint as a minimum-wage cashier representing the American franchise wasn’t mentioned until she first ran for president in 2019, and the story was absent from both of her memoirs, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as ‘her humble background,'” the Beacon reported. “For decades,” however, “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.” Even “third-party biographers did not write about it.”
The first mention of her alleged time as a McDonald’s employee came in 2019, when she told a labor rally in Las Vegas she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s,” according to the Free Beacon. After the Harris campaign was asked about the details of her early résumé, the Beacon reported, aides changed her story in a statement to Politico, claiming she took a “summer job” to earn extra cash, not to pay for school.
“It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s,” the Beacon wrote. “But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.”
In other words, Harris likely embellished a fast-food resume to escape characterizations of West Coast elitism. The vice president, however, almost certainly never became the target of customer pranks or had angry patrons throw cheap meat at her.
When I worked the drive-thru in high school, people around town would do something called “tea bombing,” wherein customers would pull up to the pick-up window after ordering an iced tea and would aggressively grab the cup with both hands to explode the liquid back in the window. This never happened to me, but it happened to my brother and colleagues a handful of times, and they were especially frustrated when the tea was ordered “sweet.”
My brother and I didn’t even work in a trashy neighborhood. We were in the same development park as the Bob Evans where Ohio Gov. John Kasich apparently bought his pancakes every other morning, not more than 10 minutes from his house. But most fast-food jobs obviously suck, and ours was no different in terms of working for a trashy manager selling trash food for trash wages at trash hours while smelling like trash. No matter how many times we washed our uniforms, the stench of McDonald’s grease followed us home while the long hours serving “Happy Meals” were evident by the pimples that bubbled up across our faces.
I can only imagine how Harris might have been as a colleague in the trenches of the drive-thru waxing poetically eloquent about “what could have been” and “what can still be.” Now, as a major party candidate for president, she can be “unburdened by what has been,” whatever that means. She’s so motivational. But sometimes other employees would smoke marijuana by the dumpster, where she might have been a major buzzkill.
McDonald’s is where I saw the American obesity epidemic play out up close. Colleagues often put on weight because of the constant access to cheap and addictive food. The same customers, meanwhile, rolled through the pick-up windows on a routine basis. Our location wasn’t struggling, but it’s often these regulars at fast-food chains who keep the stores afloat.
The fast-food industry isn’t about bringing in new customers. The game is about maintaining repeat users. A broken ice cream machine would often throw these users into a rage, like a coke addict deprived of his daily fix. Any inconvenience from the convenience food industry felt like an offense to the community hooked on our hyper-processed products.
I’m not offended by Harris’ résumé embellishment. Just about everybody in the service industry would probably agree these are the kinds of jobs they’d wish everyone would have to work someday before climbing the career ladder.
But it’s amazing that Harris never offered proof for something so easily verifiable when accused of lying about her employment for Ronald McDonald. Given how easy it is for Democrats to lie these days, I’m surprised more haven’t claimed to be veterans of the Golden Arches.