Former President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on Tuesday poked fun at former President Donald Trump for briefly jumping behind the fry cooker at a closed McDonald’s in Pennsylvania over the weekend.
Trump’s campaign stop, meant to troll Vice President Kamala Harris over her disputed employment at the fast-food chain, was repeatedly referenced at a Wisconsin rally by Obama and Walz, who insisted Harris worked at McDonald’s decades ago.
Harris “is a leader who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and need a champion, somebody who was raised in a middle-class family, who actually worked at McDonald’s when she was in college to pay her expenses,” Obama told a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. “Didn’t just pretend like she worked at McDonald’s when it was closed.”
Obama has stepped up his campaigning for Democrats in the final weeks until Election Day and was scheduled to introduce rapper Eminem later that night at a Harris rally in Detroit, Michigan.
Walz quipped that McDonald’s found Trump “an apron his size” and questioned whether the GOP presidential nominee “mixed up his weekends and thought that it was Halloween already.”
Harris’s purported work history at the popular chain has become a point of contention on the campaign trail. She’s claimed to have worked at a location in the summer of 1983 when home from attending Howard University, which her campaign has identified as the one on Central Avenue in Alameda, California.
Trump and his campaign have accused her of fabricating the tale to better relate to middle-class voters.
“He looks much more like Ronald McDonald than the clown that he actually is,” Walz said. “And Ronald wears less makeup.”
Walz, turning to a more serious page, chastised Trump as “cruel” for being a “billionaire using people’s livelihood as a political prop.”
“Kamala actually worked at McDonald’s and did that job,” he continued. “We know that the economy works best when everybody has an opportunity to get ahead and thrive.”
Harris has faced conservative accusations of falsifying the story in part because she left the work history off past job applications. McDonald’s also said neither the national brand nor its local franchisees have employment records dating back that far for all positions.
“While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ‘80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had,” McDonald’s said in a statement to its employees, referencing a statistic that 1-in-8 Americans at some point in their lives work at McDonald’s.
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McDonald’s also offered a nonpartisan response to Trump’s viral visit. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president. We are not red or blue — we are golden,” the company declared.
Trump boasted from the McDonald’s drive-thru window that his short time there meant that he had “now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala.”
