As apparently instructed by the Trump campaign, the Media Research Center spent no small part of the presidential campaign obsessing on an extremely minor issue: whether Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s as a teenager. Here’s how the MRC initially pushed the inanity:
- Alex Christy demanded that both an interviewer of Harris and moderators at the Trump-Harris debate ask Harris if she actually worked at McDonald’s and why she “never mentioned it until you decided to run for president.”
- Tim Graham huiffed in a Sept. 9 post: “The Washington Free Beacon offered evidence that Harris didn’t list any employment at McDonald’s on a job application shortly after she allegedly worked there. Snopes.com ruled her claim was ‘Unproven.'”
- Jorge Bonilla whined that in an interview with Harris, Stephanie Ruhle made a joke of Republican obsession with the issue.
- Graham returned to grumble in a Sept. 27 post that one reporter “even repeated Harris’s claim that she worked at McDonald’s one summer in her college years,” repeating the Free Beacon’s inconclusive alleged reporting.
- Curtis Houck complained that in his interview with Harris, Howard Stern “gushed over her (false) claim about working at McDonald’s” — while offering no proof the claim was false.
So when Trump pulled a stunt of pretending to work at McDonald’s for 15 minutes in an attempt to bolster the shaky narrative, the MRC was totally ready to defend the lameness of it (just as Newsmax did). Bonilla groused in an Oct. 20 post:
In keeping with an earlier promise, former President Donald Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonald’s for a 15-minute shift at the fry station and drive-through. The CBS Evening News came unglued.
Watch as correspondent Caitlyn Huey-Burns dismisses the Trump workday as little more than a “political stunt”:
[…]One imagines the hushed, reverential tones that Huey-Burns might deploy were Kamala Harris to take a shift working the Baby ChopVac 9000 at the local Planned Parenthood. She might even call it an example of Harris being relatable. She certainly wouldn’t sneeringly call it a “stunt”.
But, alas, this is Donald Trump. At a McDonald’s. Doing something we used to call “retail politics”. And the Regime Media, in their perpetual bitterness, are bitter at the fact Trump can pull these things off without running away from unscheduled human contact.
In this bitterness, Huey-Burns is left to firefight for Kamala Harris’s college job at McDonald’s which, without evidence, she claims to have worked.
Bonilla offered no proof she did not. The next day, Curtis Houck tried to present the Free Beacon’s uterly non-conclusive nattering about Harris as some massive investigative reporting endeavor:
CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today went apoplectic on Monday over former President Trump’s campaign stop at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, melting down over the “staged” event with “prescreened supporters” by the campaign (and presumably the Secret Service) and falsely arguing Trump “claim[ed] without any evidence that Vice President Harris didn’t once work at the fast food chain[.]”
By doing so, the Harris lemmings ignored extensive reporting by the great Washington Free Beacon, which has spent months covering this Harris claim that has zero concrete evidence to support it, including from McDonald’s itself.
CBS co-host Tony Dokoupil twice hit Trump, downplaying it as “staged” event. White House and campaign corresponded Ed O’Keefe had the network’s 2024 report and shared that Trump went “on offense last night in battleground Pennsylvania, visiting a Pittsburgh Steelers game” after “a day of campaign stops.”
[…]He then played a clip of Trump saying “she never worked at McDonald’s,” but dutifully rebutted that as though he were a Harris surrogate: “She says she did. He leaned through the drive-through window to take reporter questions, but wouldn’t say if he supports boosting the minimum wage.”
It seems the real lemming here is Houck, slavishly adhering to his assigned talking points.
Graham rehashed this whining in his Oct. 22 podcast:
Then look at CBS ripping Trump for having some fun with Kamala Harris’s unproven claim that she worked at McDonald’s one summer. Trump manned the drive-through and served up some fries at a franchise in Pennsylvania.
Ed O’Keefe on CBS weirdly claimed Trump had “no evidence” that Harris did NOT work there. Harris has yet to prove she did, but the liberal reporters say “she said she did,” and that should be good enough. O’Keefe said Trump’s campaign day “included a visit to a McDonald’s, closed just for him, where he tried scoring political points after claiming without any evidence, that Vice President Harris didn’t once work at the fast food chain while in college.”
The New York Times headline was “Trump, Slinging Fries and Smearing Harris, Takes Turn Behind a McDonald’s Counter.”
Reporter Michael Gold sent this message: “The visit married his two fixations: his well-documented affection for fast food — McDonald’s in particular — and a more recent pattern of accusing Vice President Kamala Harris without evidence of lying about a summer job working at McDonald’s.”
Graham didn’t disprove anything those reporters said.
Joseph Vazquez complained in an Oct. 23 post:
The New York Times was so triggered by former President Donald Trump’s recent trolling of Vice President Kamala Harris’ employment record that it committed a major logical fallacy when attempting to fact-check him.
Trump made a high-profile appearance at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania to work the fryers, on Oct. 20 and The Times couldn’t handle it. The newspaper fired off a bevy of whiny news items complaining about Trump casting doubt on Harris’ claim that she formerly worked for fast-food giant. “Kamala Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job, and a Trump Attack” and “Trump, Slinging Fries and Smearing Harris, Takes Turn Behind a McDonald’s Counter,” were just two of the headlines that led the propaganda-laced stories. Both stories tried to idiotically put the burden of proof on Trump, suggesting he must prove that Harris never worked at McDonald’s instead of expecting Harris to prove her own claims that she did.
The Times apparently suffered from an extreme lack of self-awareness when drafting their stories. The authors railed against Trump’s alleged “pattern of accusing Vice President Kamala Harris without evidence of lying about a summer job working at McDonald’s.”
But what evidence did The Times utilize to retort Trump? None.
What evidence did Vazquez utilize to report to Harris? None.
In an Oct. 31 post, Mark Finkelstein claimed that CNN’s Kasie Hunt “was clearly worried by Trump’s entertaining, attention-attracting moves of working in a McDonald’s and riding shotgun in a garbage truck. She insisted instead that voters focus on Trump’s history of election denial and hints that he might do it again this year,” pointing out that such stunts were designed to distract from his own hateful rhetoric. After Hunt dropped a “forest for the trees” response, Finkelstein huffed: “The ‘trees’ that should be disregarded are Trump’s photo-ops. The ‘forest’ to which attention must be paid is Trump’s 2020 election denial and his supposed threats to do it again.” Finkelstein didn’t explain why that should be ignored.