The Republican candidate for the White House, former president (2017-2021) Donald Trump, campaigned this Sunday at a McDonald’s store in the key state of Pennsylvania, where he accused his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, of having invented who as a young man worked for this fast food chain.
The Republican made a stop at a franchise location on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where he put on an apron and spent a few minutes cooking French fries alongside employees and handing them out through the drive-thru window.
“I love McDonalds. I love jobs. And I think it is inappropriate when someone says everywhere that they worked at a McDonald’s (…) but they never worked at a McDonald’s,” said the Republican about his Democratic rival.
According to the Harris campaign, the vice president worked during the summer of 1983 at a McDonald’s in the city of Alameda (California), working the cash register and cooking French fries, to pay for her studies at Howard University in Washington.
Harris, who has not offered more details on the matter, usually explains this story to show closeness to the working classes and distance herself from Trump, a real estate magnate who inherited his father’s empire.
The Republican, a big fast food consumer who in 2019 handed out McDonald’s hamburgers at a White House event, has accused Harris several times of having invented that part of his resume.
Ian Sams, Harris’ spokesman, said this Sunday that Trump is lying out of desperation: “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because they gave him millions on a silver platter and then he squandered them,” he said.
Harris does not mention her experience at McDonald’s in her memoirs and apparently the first time she spoke about it publicly was in her first presidential campaign in 2019, when she joined striking workers at that company in Las Vegas.
McDonald’s has avoided responding to several requests for information from US media asking to confirm whether Harris worked at the restaurant 40 years ago.
Trump has a long history of spreading falsehoods about the past of his political rivals and was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama (2009-2017) was born in Kenya and, therefore, the US Constitution. It prevented him from being president.
In recent days, the Republican has gained ground in the polls over his Democratic rival, and the elections on November 5 are shaping up to be the closest in the last century in the United States.
The candidacy of Harris, who replaced President Joe Biden after he threw in the towel in July, initially aroused great enthusiasm that carried over into the polls, but Trump has managed to shatter that advantage with 16 days left until the elections.
According to the latest forecast from the FiveThiryEight portal based on the average of polls published nationally and in key states, Trump has a slight advantage over Harris and has a 52% chance of winning the November 5 elections.
Although the Democrat leads voting intentions at the national level, the Republican is more favored by the Electoral College, the system by which states award a certain number of electoral votes to the winning candidate.
Two weeks ago, the same portal’s forecast gave Harris a 58% chance of defeating Trump.
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