Trump serves fries under the Golden Arches, drawing attention to Harris’s questionable claim

While her campaign originally said she worked there ‘to pay her way through college,’ Harris was forced to dial back that claim and has since said she worked the job for extra cash.

By Joseph Simonson, The Washington Free Beacon

In a made-for-TV effort to raise questions about one of his opponent’s central campaign claims, former president Donald Trump worked a short shift at a Bucks County, Pa., McDonald’s on Sunday afternoon.

Speaking through a drive-thru window at a Feasterville-Trevose McDonald’s franchise, Trump, sporting a McDonald’s apron, told reporters, “Now I have worked at McDonald’s. I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala, she never worked here.”

He was referring to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s claim to have worked at the fast-food chain for a summer during college.

While her campaign originally said she worked there “to pay her way through college,” Harris was forced to dial back that claim and has since said she worked the job for extra cash.

Given the campaign’s shifting narratives about the job, a Washington Free Beacon report in August raised questions about whether Harris had actually worked at McDonald’s.

Since then, neither she nor her campaign have substantiated the claim, though the New York Times on Sunday said it had located a Harris pal to whom Harris’s deceased mother had mentioned the gig.

“The campaign did not make any of Ms. Harris’s friends or family members available for interviews about their recollections of her experience there,” the Times said.

Harris has stopped mentioning her stint at McDonald’s on the campaign trail since the Free Beacon report in August. The job was initially featured in super PAC ads and stump speeches.

Trump’s visit to that particular McDonald’s was no coincidence. Located in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Bucks County is considered a critical swing district in the state.

“Well I do appreciate [McDonald’s’] a little bit more, yeah. You take it for granted, I’ll never forget this experience,” Trump told the Free Beacon when asked if his time at the fry station changed his opinion of the restaurant’s food. “Now I know how to do it.”

The Times on Sunday dubbed Trump’s claims that Harris never worked at McDonald’s “burgerism,” a new form of “birtherism,” a reference to the belief that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Although the paper said Harris’s campaign “did not make any of [her] friends or family members available for interviews about their recollections of her experience there,” it nonetheless concluded that Trump’s allegation “appears to be false.”

The Times, which credited six reporters with contributing to the story, left unmentioned the fact that the Harris campaign’s claims about the job have changed and that Harris’s biographer, Dan Morain, told the Free Beacon in August that he was “not aware” that Harris had worked at McDonald’s.

Though the Harris campaign refused to provide any information to the Times about the circumstances of Harris’s work at the restaurant, the paper wrote that “as with the birtherism conspiracy theory, this one puts Ms. Harris and her aides in something of a bind. Tracking down pay stubs or other documentation from so long ago would be a difficult task for almost anyone.”

Obama did in fact produce a birth certificate demonstrating that he was born in the United States.