Ever since the 2004 election one of the Republican Party’s favorite tactics against Democratic opponents is the swift boat attack. You’ll recall that the country was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan so Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was emphasizing his heroic Vietnam war record. Some veterans, angry at Kerry’s subsequent anti-war activities, contended that Kerry, a swift boat officer, was lying about his wartime actions. The GOP coordinated a full-fledged smear campaign which has become known as swiftboating.
The operation was run by none other than Chris LaCivita, Donald Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager. So I suppose it’s not too surprising that the campaign believes it’s found a way to swiftboat Kamala Harris. Since that inane accusation that she was lying about being Black didn’t really work out, they seem to think that calling into question the veracity of Harris’ claim to have worked at McDonald’s when she was in college is some kind of stolen valor. (As the Daily Show quipped, “How dare she disrespect our men and women in uniform like that!)
Trump has been pounding this theme for the last couple of weeks at every event, screaming that she is a liar, as if lying about working at a burger joint 41 years ago disrespects a sacred American institution and disqualifies her for the presidency. He’s so upset that he’s promising to go to a McDonald’s and “work the fries” himself for half an hour to prove … what? That she couldn’t possibly have scooped the fries as well as he does? I don’t get it.
He brought it up at his rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania on Monday:
I think I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s next week, some place. “I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s, and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”
“But she said she worked, and grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s, it was such—SHE NEVER WORKED THERE! And these FAKE news reporters will never report it. They don’t want to report it because they’re FAKE! They’re FAKE! They don’t want to report it,”
“She never worked at McDonald’s, but it was a big part of her résumé.
Here he was in New York on Thursday:
LaCivita needs to drill him a little better on this one. He got the talking points all confused. The problem was supposed to be that she’d never listed it on her résumé, not that it was a big part of it.
The LA Times reported on how this whole story took off in the right wing media sphere:
On Aug. 29, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, published a report that questioned whether Harris had worked at McDonald’s, saying that the job was not listed on a resume she submitted a year after college and noting that biographers had not mentioned the work either. Trump’s campaign seized on the story, demanding that Harris prove she worked for the chain.
The Free Beacon story found it very odd that she didn’t have it on the professional résumé which listed her work as a law clerk, assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and an internship with former California Senator Alan Cranston. Her summer job at the fry station wasn’t exactly relevant. (Full disclosure: I worked at Uncles Pizza Parlor when I was a teenager and I never once listed it on a résumé or even a job application. I do, however, have a burn scar on my right forearm to prove it.)
But here we have Trump getting the story backward and saying it was a “big part of her resume” because he is addled and doesn’t make sense half the time anyway. For some reason he really likes this smear and often gets very animated and loud when he talks about it, I would guess because he thinks his working class followers will be very offended that she would lie about doing the job that they do, as if they identify strongly as fast food professionals. (Trump knows nothing about what it’s like to work in a job like that since he was born wealthy and never worked anywhere that didn’t have his name on it but he does love to eat McDonald’s so maybe this particularly aggrieves him?)
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle interviewed Harris this week and asked about the McDonald’s job and Harris explained why she has brought it up in this campaign:
Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.
She’s right about that and Trump and his team seem to think he needs to show more of a common touch because he’s been doing something very different in this campaign. He’s been trying to mingle with “real people” something he never did much of before. This week he went to a grocery store and you would have thought he’d made a quick trip to Mars:
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
These “real people” events are always strange and very inauthentic for Trump. He used to avoid such corny moments, perhaps understanding his appeal better back when he was still seen as a reality TV celebrity. He was quoted saying back in 2016:
Don’t forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come . . . and they said, “Wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.” I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird.
This year he’s going to go to McDonald’s to make french fries and prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. Now that’s what I call weird.
Read more
about this topic