October 21, 2024

WE’VE ENTERED SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Trump’s genius McDonald’s stunt will fry Kamala at the ballot box.

“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”

I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.

As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.

First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.

This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.

But then, she didn’t mention it in her memoir, nor does it appear on the 1987 résumé she submitted when applying for a position at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office despite listing her other work experiences.

It was like it never happened at all!

Even more intriguingly, the New York Times reported on Sunday: “In subsequent years, Ms. Harris talked so little about her long-ago job at McDonald’s that even some of her friends and close aides did not know she had worked there.”

Hmmm.

Forgive me, but I smell the same gigantic, disingenuous rat that Trump’s been smelling about Kamala’s supposed McDonald’s career move.

And it matters because it goes right to the heart of the Democratic candidate’s persistent pitch that she is the truth antidote to fork-tongued Trump.

If you’re going to position yourself as a bastion of honesty, you can’t tell brazen, self-promoting “I’m middle class just like you” fibs about working at McDonald’s.

McDonald’s issued a very carefully written statement yesterday, droning on about the unique American qualities of the Golden Arches:

Did you catch that, buried four paragraphs into the boilerplate?

Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes “1 in 8” so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.

“While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s” is a polite way of saying, “In spite of our best efforts, and believe me, we really tried, because as a ‘modern, progressive burger company,’ we really, really hate the Bad Orange Man, but we couldn’t find any proof she worked for us, either. What was she thinking doctoring her bio in the age of the Internet?”

(And why is the Kamala campaign sending out a tweet under Tim Walz’s name rather having Harris out front and center to dispute this story and/or offer proof she actually worked at Mickey D’s?)

The other benefit of Trump working at McDonald’s is that’s causing the DNC-MSM to massively overreach (or to borrow from their vernacular when they report on the response of the other side of the aisle, “sieze!” and “pounce!”) in condemning a politician for having fun with an obvious election season stunt. QED:

As the Book of Saul tells us, “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. ‘If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.'”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll