LATROBE, Pa. — LATROBE, Pa. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is expected to visit a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday as he continues to criticize Democrat Kamala Harris and claim without evidence that she never worked at a fast food chain while in college.
His plan is to visit a McDonald’s and work the fry cooker before heading to an evening town hall in Lancaster and then attending the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home game against the New York Jets.
The former president has focused in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she had in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while studying at Howard University in Washington. Trump claimed the vice president never worked there, the latest example of his long-standing strategy of seizing on conspiracy theories and questioning the credentials of his political opponents.
Trump reiterated that claim Friday night at a campaign rally in Detroit, saying Harris “lied about working at McDonald’s.”
“It’s not much, but can I be honest with you, it’s terrible,” Trump said.
Harris, who served as a California prosecutor before becoming a senator and vice president, discusses her experience at McDonald’s as a way to show she understands the struggles of the working class.
“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie,” Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams said Sunday. “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because he was handed millions on a silver platter, only to have it blow.”
In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president rejected Trump’s claims, saying she had worked at a fast food chain four decades ago when she was in college.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people working at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
Harris also said, “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent is our views on the needs of the American people and our responsibility to meet those needs. »
Trump’s top campaign adviser, Jason Miller, told reporters Saturday that Trump would make a stop “so that a candidate in this race could actually have worked at McDonald’s.”
“Since Kamala Harris didn’t do it, President Trump will have worked at McDonald’s by the end of tomorrow. He will have made more fries than Kamala Harris ever made,” Miller said. “I think it shows that he connects with hard-working Americans.”
Harris’ campaign did not immediately comment on Trump’s McDonald’s plan.
McDonald’s representatives did not respond to a message about whether the company had any history of employment at one of its restaurants 40 years ago.
This is far from the first time Trump has promoted baseless claims. Most notably, he falsely claims that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden due to voter fraud. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants settling in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.
Trump has long attacked his opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities.
Before running for president, Trump was a leading voice in the “Birthers” conspiracy that baselessly claimed that President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not a U.S. citizen, and therefore was not not eligible for the presidency. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first presidential campaign, Trump repeated tabloid claims that the Cuban-born father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz had ties to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump were competing for the party’s nomination in 2016.
In January of this year, when Trump was facing Nikki Haley, his former UN ambassador, in the Republican primary, he shared a post on his social media network containing false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens at birth, thus making her ineligible. be president.
Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants born in South Carolina, which automatically makes her a native-born citizen and meets the constitutional requirements to run for president.
Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on claims about McDonald’s four decades ago was a “confusing detour” but that Trump “doesn’t hesitate to throw away anything it’s on the wall to see if it sticks.”
“When Donald Trump isn’t talking about the economy and illegal immigration, he’s going off topic on the things people care about,” Marson said.
Marson suggested that Trump would be better off talking about the economy and immigration, not something he called “off-topic.”
“I don’t think there’s an undecided voter who will answer or make their decision based on whether or not Kamala Harris actually worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s,” Marson said.
