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This was a brilliant publicity stunt by the Trump team, and the unhinged reaction from Redditors proves why.
As I mentioned last week, Republican candidates need to "hack the media" in order to get coverage. This is a great example. Trump comes across really well in this appearance and amplifying it can only help his campaign. If, instead, he gave a speech to talk about entitlement reform or some other boring shit, he would have gotten almost no coverage (and the coverage he did get would be purely negative).
Most elections really do come down to who is the more likeable person. Trump is in his element here and seems like a genuinely nice guy as he hands out bags of greasy food.
The people who are seething that this stunt is fake, on the other hand, come off as really dumb. Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts. Do you think the Secret Service is going to let randoms through the drive through? Next, they'll tell us that pro wresting is also fake.
And finally there's also the added benefit that Kamala Harris claims to have worked at McDonald's but is probably lying about it.
Of course, most people have already made up their minds. But when the sole plank of the Harris campaign is that Trump is a monster, these humanizing events really undermine the narrative. Trump is now up to 62.5% on Polymarket, the highest since Biden left the race.
My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.
That would explain a lot.
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I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.
This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.
This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.
I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?
A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.
Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.
Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.
((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))
That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.
Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.
Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?
At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.
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"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).
It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually are upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?
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It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.
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I could still ping any of my co-workers at fast food joints and get them to corroborate that I was there, and if I ran from office they would come out of the proverbial woodwork (both good and bad on that front, perhaps). I think the fact they can't find one person who remembers working with her pretty damning.
Snopes tried their best to prove this true and still failed.
I don't think it happened.
To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.
I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.
Wouldn't the Harris campaign (who were contacted by Snopes) be highly motivated to provide some evidence for this if it were true? They couldn't find one childhood friend who said 'yeah we worked at Mickey D's together'? This has (at least for the next couple of days until the next cycle) blown up to be front and center in the presidential race.
I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).
Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."
I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)
Huh. Didn't know that. If I were vetting candidates to be VP, I would almost require that they submit their detailed earnings report and their tax returns, so it would surprise me if she didn't have it from 2019.
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Have you worked in a big campaign? I think it would be fun and enlightening if you shared your experiences on the thread!
All I know comes from West Wing and I have a feeling that the reality is way more regarded than the typical mass media depiction.
I recall talking to someone in the industry in some social event like a decade ago and being told that real life is much closer to Veep than to West Wing, except that Veep depicted everyone as far more competent than the real-life versions. I imagine they were being facetious, but I chose to take it at face value and believe it unironically, and the older I get, the more I think that was correct.
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Democratic Senate campaign, prominent at the time but losing, and I was lowest level paid staffer. Also a mayoral campaign for a major city but minor candidate.
It is indeed very regarded, but my personal experiences were dominated by 1) having a giant crush on the press secretary I worked under, 2) pretending to be the candidate to call major donors' offices, and then transferring to him if his secretary said they were available, repeat. Also, going to a strip club where every stripper was 50+ after a major victory. At one point we had a freakout over baking soda being sent in the mail (accompanied by an abortion letter).
The only real insight I have is that any conspiracy theory requiring that Democratic candidates and staffers be hyper competent ideologues is wildly off-base.
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Fair enough.
The New York Times has now seemed to find a friend that got told second hand by Harris's deceased mother that Harris was working there.
“Donald Trump claims, without evidence” is essentially the same statement Trump has made about Kamala’s fast food job.
It’s Harris that has made the positive claim and Trump says there’s no evidence.
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Am I missing something? That doesn't seem like very compelling evidence.
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Nothing's impossible, although she claimed to have worked at McD's in college, not high school.
I'll say with 95% certainty that she made shit up. Even if she didn't have photos or paystubs,
the Harris campaign could have at least provided approximate dates and the exact location where she worked. I could easily do that from my own menial jobs 20+ years ago. I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for politicians and mob bosses to have a bad memory.Edit: They did provide this info! Though none of her co-workers have come forward, it's a long time ago. On the other hand, it wasn't on her resume from 1987 nor in her memoir. I'm downgrading my probability of "made shit up" to 80%.
In the mean time, Ackman retweeted this funny dunk today:
"51 former intelligence officials say Kamala worked at @McDonalds"
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Yeah, 'worked at McDonald's but can't directly confirm it because nobody cares about early fast food jobs so why would I save records of it" is definitely a story I'm willing to believe. I don't know that Canada is necessary for that story, but it would be an added wrinkle if so.
I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.
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Maybe social media has kept people more in touch in my generation, but I can reach out to no less than four people that are direct connections on Facebook who I worked with at McDonald’s circa 2002 when I was in high school.
I just played a round of golf with one of them about a month ago.
And I’m not even much of an extrovert, much less a politician.
I worked at a grocery store a couple of summers after you mention. I don't remember anybodies name who worked there, I have no paychecks, it's unlikely I have my tax records, there are no photos of me working there, and probably the only reason the supermarket would be able to have records of me is it's part of a giant corporate chain, not a franchisee.
Throw things back another 20 years and throw in the fact it's a franchisee, I have zero doubt Kamala could've worked there a few shifts every week and she has no real records.
I didn't think I had any paper records of working at McDonald's any longer, but on a whim logged into ssa.gov to see if they did. And they do. Employer name, address, EIN, and reported earnings are all there.
Just click "Review your full earnings record now" and then on the subsequent page "Take a closer look" to get links to details for each year.
Anyone who had a job in the 80's care to see if their records are online?
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I think I can find people from about half the shitty menial jobs I worked. Entirely plausible to me that she worked at McDonald’s and doesn’t have any evidence because it was the 80’s.
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I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.
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The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.
Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.
It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.
I think this alongside the other types of events (football games for example) are things that are coded for the lower classes, the deplorables, the kinds of people that mainline Democrats sneer at while being really patronizing about their attempts to “help”. Republicans are able to appeal to that base because they don’t sneer. They see “dirty jobs” as noble, they see doing a job that needs doing so you can meet your obligations as noble. They see the note rests and sensibilities of the working class in flyover country as worthy and beautiful. And this phot opportunity highlighted the difference between the two parties. The democrats are run by the PMC who see working class whites as beneath them. They don’t want to feel snobby so they tend to give help to minorities. The republicans are the party of doers and builders.
I think your wrong about football coding low status, I mean have you seen how expensive nfl tickets are? Plenty of wealthy high status people enjoy attending them
High-end spectator sport has always been high status. More than half the traditional British social season is spectator sport.
There is a separate issue that specific sports can acquire a lowbrow connotation (like association football in the UK for most of the 20th century) because an alternative is higher-status, but the NFL never fell into that bucket. The Ivy League is primarily an American football league, for crissakes. To a WASPy blueblood, "The Game" is a football game. (Compare the UK, where "The Varsity Match" is a rugby game).
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Yeah, this seems to capture a lot of the feels.
Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to. And while that's obviously reductive, there's a strong element of truth there.
The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!
Trump, despite being raised rich, seems to get it. It's weird. I feel my own common touch fading away with every passing year.
This reminds me of the narrative I bought into about 20 years ago, when the left was pushing the idea that everyone, including those in the Middle East, just wanted liberal democracy (even if they weren't aware of it). So once freed from the religious oppressive forces keeping them down, they'd gravitate towards such a system like in America. Same for immigrants from such cultures, whose kids would see how awesome liberal democracy is and thus adopt its values. I particularly recall a (more recent, but still like a decade old, I think?) 5-hour long conversation between Cenk Uygher and Sam Harris about this kind of stuff, where Cenk was smugly telling Sam about how suicide bombers and other similar Muslim terrorists could just be won over with the benefits of Western liberal values.
I think the amount of epicycles that have been required to explain the various failures and speedbumps that such a narrative has encountered in the past 2 decades shows that, no, it was rather that the people who pushed such a narrative largely just lacked the ability or willingness to appreciate the true diversity of thought there exists in humans. I don't put much weight to any sort of sociological study anymore, but I suspect that the findings that liberals in America have a hard time modeling how conservatives think in a way that doesn't exist in reverse might be pointing at something that's true. Likewise for the cliche that "liberals think conservatives are evil; conservatives think liberals are stupid."
I honestly think most people simply are not good at understanding the Zeitgeist of cultures outside of their own and perhaps nearby cultures that are fairly similar. We don’t really get the MENA region because most of us are generations removed from a culture that took religion seriously. To most WEIRD people, religion is just a personal preference, probably not much more important than other lifestyle choices. We don’t think of God in universal terms and not really as a thing to order society by. We would never ever suggest a state religion except in a nominalistic way— yes we’re Anglican, but it’s not like we take it seriously enough to seriously teach it or publicly acknowledge it or encourage its practice.
Comparing that to MENA, they’d be convinced that most of the West are atheists. They don’t allow the public display of religion outside of the state sect of Islam. They not only live by those rules themselves, and publicly so, but enforce those rules on everyone whether Muslims or not. The Quran bans homosexual behavior and they will teach gays to fly off skyscrapers. The mindset is that Allah is watching and allah is going to not only keep score but intervene in history and in personal life to enforce his will.
Now on the liberal conservative version, I think it’s the same thing. Liberals are farther along the path to practical atheism. Most have at best found churches that are liberal first and Christian second, if they bother to go. They’re much more down the path of chewing almost everything through the Post-Modern Neo-Marxist lens of oppression and global culture norms of not judging anything except traditional Western values. As such they simply cannot fathom that someone might take such things seriously.
MENA was a seriously different place from the west even when the west took religion seriously; endemic cousin marriage and segmentary lineage will do that
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And some guy called Shelly Wynter commented to outrage a week ago:
Black people certainly do have their own um... interesting versions of everything.
What Donald Trump has over Mitt Romney, J.D. Vance, and Ron DeSantis is that black people seem to genuinely like him. He's got swag. He's the second blackest President in history, trailing Bill Clinton but ahead of Obama.
But there are downsides. My elderly WASP relatives hate him. So disrespectful, so uncouth! Can't win New Hampshire with an attitude like that.
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And here I thought being in the party of racism supporters would more easily bring himself to quote that directly.
Of course, his massa(s) will beat his ass if he says it, which implies he himself serves in the house.
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There's definitely a stolen valor angle. "Kamala had actually worked there while Trump never had a day of retail work in his life". Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?
McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.
To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.
They have both. Democrats dominate the people without income, people with extremely low income, and people with high income derived from sinecures.
They lose most of the rest.
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Costco notoriously pays above market and doesn't hire temporary workers, so it would have to be Walmart.
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Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.
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I haven't seen 'stolen valour' as an angle except from republicans trying to psychoanalyze their opponents. While this might be somewhat more likely to be accurate than the reverse, that's still a low enough bar to clear that it doesn't tell us much. I think most of the chatter is probably just TDS.
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I think Reddit is populated mostly by college age children of PMC parents or by failsons who were raised in a PMC family. So while the actual PMC democrats probably aren’t, the people posting on Reddit have been raised in PMC families and have those values. They’re more obnoxious about it mostly because they don’t have the wisdom to hide their PMC power level, or perhaps don’t have to care yet.
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There's an angle, definitely. But my visceral response is that people would be much less angry at Trump doing a CostCo photo op than a McDonald's photo op. And, by the same token, there's a reason his campaign decided to do a McDonald's photo op over a CostCo photo op. The role McDonald's plays in the American imagination is key. Or, rather, in the two decidedly different American imaginations: one where it's symbolic of all the worst of American culture, and one where it gives fast convenient yummy oily treats.
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I'd be open to the possibility, but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.
I'm sorry what? Do you think /r/antiwork, or the entirety of Reddit for that matter, is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?
This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.
No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.
What's your definition of "someone"?
Well no, I think a typical worker in service industry or any other low-paid job posts on TikTok, not Reddit. Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".
Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.
Most people on planet Earth have never heard about it. Most people who will see this will think "heh, that's kinda funny". Somewhere, out there, there might be some lonely indivuduals upset at the valor stolen from service workers, but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.
"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.
I know this will sound weird, but I don't know if I believe you. Kavanaugh being a rapist vs. not was a disagreement of visceral resonances, Rittenhouse being a murderer vs. an innocent kid was a disagreement of visceral resonances... but this? The only visceral feeling I get here from the progressive side is "Trump bad. This good for Trump, therefore this bad".
Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.
What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform?
Here on the Motte? If not, then where?
I agree with other users that it's a clever publicity stunt, in that it will work with his base and the opposing base, naturally, is irrelevant to him. It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done. If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest even if she'll alienate the voters (likely red-voting anyway) who think menial work is always ennobling.
It's the same link. You don't really expect people to outright say "damn that Trump, why is he so appealing?" even that's what they feel, do you?
We're running short on those these days. I guess you can still post anything you want on Substack.
I'd chalk it up to getting upset at Gillette's slogan again, except:
This is completely backwards. There is no evidence she has spent a single day working in McDonalds. It's Trump who's honest here because his "lie" is just advertising, and everybody knows how it works. Kamala is the dishonest one, because people (including you) actually believe she made a factual statement about herself.
This is also how we know people upset at this aren't upset at dishonesty or stolen valor. No one who is criticizing Trump for this will turn around to criticize Harris, when it's pointed out she didn't work for McDonald's.
I expect people to say "damn those republicans, why are they so easy to appeal to with what does not appeal to us". Which people do say.
I suppose you're right here. I'm not so much criticizing Trump, I'm just incensed that it's working. The way I see it, fool me once means shame on you. But fool me twice, thrice, a million times, and you're an "honest liar" and we're supposed to regard you as someone so detached from truth that it's not even in question whether anyone is actually being deceived.
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I don’t think republicans think menial labor is per se ennobling. Instead, it is admirable to work instead of take hand me outs. That is, I don’t want people to stay working at menial jobs but if they start there and work hard in an effort to move up — kudos!
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Yes, but associating yourself with them is the thing you have to do if you want to manage a company filled with the people doing those things regardless of whether you see yourself as above them or not (which you'll recognize as the stereotypical Karen mindset).
That is [one of] your job[s] in that position; Kamala is refusing to do that job.
(And that's completely ignoring the "leader is himself a servant" thing being... kind of foundational to the "Protestant" part of "Protestant work ethic".)
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Do they?
Even dictators can do a good photo op.
No, they can't. Their attempts to be cool are all cringe and gay.
Trump hit a real nerve here. People liked what they saw. The common touch is not easy to fake. Witness the multiple attempts by Harris proxies to do the same and fail.
Attack Trump for his policies all you want, but he can speak to the people in a way that few politicians can. He's not a phony.
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They don't want to let it get to the "funny pic of Gaddafi or Putin shirtless on a horse" stage. They want it to stay at the "ominous devil figure" stage. The former implies some fatalism.
They've never made their peace with the fact that their country can elect someone like Trump and they don't want anyone else to either. Ironically, it's the "where my country gone?" meme they mocked for so long.
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