Like Lady GaGa investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, right-wing media outlet the Washington Free Beacon is similarly trying to get to the bottom of one of the great political issues of our time: Whether Vice President Kamala Harris did or did not work at McDonald’s as an undergraduate student in the 1980s. On Thursday, the outlet published a story seemingly casting doubt on Harris’ tenure as a fry cook, even though she’s referenced it multiple times on the campaign trail. Their main evidence seems to be that, on at least one job application following her college graduation, Harris didn’t list her summer job at the fast food joint.
“It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college,” the article, co-authored by not two but three different Free Beacon journalists, reveals. “Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she ‘was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.’" Mind you, Donald Trump has never submitted a job application in his entire life, but this, the Free Beacon insists, is the real scandal.
The article then states that “the McDonald’s Corporation, which is proud of its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian, did not return several requests for comment.” Nor has the corporation given “comment on Harris’s claims to have done the fries.”
Love the idea that McDonald's maintains a vast Borgesian universal library where they have the names of everyone who ever flipped a burger for them. https://t.co/HmOBYQzBdd
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 29, 2024
Welp, they got her now, folks. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, may not have listed her summer job at McDonald’s on her resume while applying to clerk for a district attorney's office, after graduating from college decades ago. Since the Free Beacon’s article, political fact-checker Snopes, too, is looking into the matter, stating in a post this week that they’ve “reached out to Harris' campaign and McDonald's and we'll update this report when, or if, we learn more.” The nation is sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting with bated breath for the outcome of this urgently important investigation…
There’s a lot to laugh about with the Free Beacon’s very serious work of journalism, and indeed, social media users are getting a kick out of what somehow feels even sillier than right-wing media’s now-decade-old, 2014 freakout over President Obama’s tan suit. But in many ways, it’s an embodiment of the current state of American politics—a Democratic presidential candidate who obviously has their own problems, but no real, substantive scandals; a Republican president convicted of numerous felonies who tried to overturn the 2020 election; and a right-wing outlet determined to selectively perform outrage at only one of these individuals.
