The Republican presidential candidate served up fries in footage of him at the fast-food restaurant
“I’ll take a Big Mac, fries, and uh, what are your thoughts on increasing employment rates?”
It’s not the usual McDonald’s order, but customers could have slipped the query in as they were being served by none other than presidential candidate Donald Trump, when he appeared to take on a shift at the fast-food chain on October 20.
The Republican could be seen handing out orders and cooking food in posts shared on his website and TikTok feed, but some viewers aren’t convinced by the performance.
Internet users began to do some digging after Trump shared the news of his shift, explaining that he wanted to work at McDonald’s because he claimed a story about his opponent, Kamala Harris, working there was untrue.
For reference, Harris’ campaign and a friend who knew Harris at the time have stood by the claim that the Democratic candidate is a former McDonald’s employee, The New York Times reports.
But Trump has insisted Harris is lying – without any evidence – saying in his video: “I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did but it turned out to be a totally phoney story.”
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Trump handed orders out of the drive-thru window and said he was having ‘a lot of fun’, but some people claim to have found ‘proof’ that the former president was lying about the work he did at McDonald’s.
One post shared on Reddit features an image of a sign featuring the recognizable McDonald’s logo, and states the restaurant in Feasterville, Pennsylvania would be ‘closed… to accommodate a visit at the request of former President Trump and his campaign’.
The post also featured an image of a car waiting at an empty drive-thru, with a caption claiming: “There was a car rehearsal.”
On Trump’s website, it states that the former president ‘cooked food, bagged fries [and] worked the drive-through’, though ABC News reports that the restaurant itself was indeed closed to the public while Trump was visiting.
But while Trump wouldn’t have had to serve regular customers approaching the counter, reporters at the scene saw the former president being taught how to properly cook and season the McDonald’s fries, and serving people in the drive-thru lane.
Trump also took questions from the media as they were positioned outside, though towards the end of his appearance he described it as a ‘strange place to do a news conference’.
After footage of Trump’s shift was shared online, Joseph Costello, spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said the visit ‘showed exactly what we would see in a second Trump term: exploiting working people for his own personal gain’.
In a statement, Costello added: “Trump doesn’t understand what it’s like to work for a living, no matter how many staged photo ops he does, and his entire second term plan is to give himself, his wealthy buddies, and giant corporations another massive tax cut.”
In response to the accusations of Trump ‘staging’ the appearance, Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, doubled down on the claim that Harris ‘lied about ever working at McDonald’s’ and alleged she is ‘now lying about President Trump’s historic moment making delicious French fries at a McDonald’s in battleground Pennsylvania’.
Rogers added: “The truth: President Trump has now worked at McDonald’s longer than Kamala Harris ever did.”