When Trump fed the press a nothingburger It smells like the Hunter Biden laptop story

Trump’s calculations were more straightforward. The uncertainty around that 1983 summer job gave him enough (for him) latitude to accuse his opponent of lying, and Trump, a prolific liar himself, really likes to accuse his opponents of lying. Indeed, one suspects that Trump staged his 15 minutes of french-fry making fame entirely as a set-up for the punchline he delivered when he was finished — “I’ve now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Several times, while speaking out the drive-through window to friendly reporters, he repeated that Kamala had lied about her McDonald’s job, while also lying about McDonald’s confirming his claim that Harris was lying. It hadn’t confirmed this.

For me, Trump calling Harris a liar on this seemingly trivial point is irresponsible. I think you should have solid proof before you accuse someone of lying. Then again, I’m sort of pathologically credulous, dangerously slow to suspect the person I’m talking to might not be as childishly earnest in conversation as I am. Lying is destructive of communicative trust, but so is accusing people of lying.

Yet Trump’s accusation does have a little behind it. Reporters friendly to the Harris campaign have produced one person who backs up Harris’s claim, but only third-hand. That is, an old friend of Harris’s when they were teenagers remembers Harris’s mother later saying something about Kamala having worked at McDonald’s. Media have treated this bit of hearsay as serious evidence, but you only have to imagine the tables being turned to see how little evidentiary work it really does. If it were Trump, in other words, reporters would roll their eyes. And the Washington Free Beacon provides a big enough stack of circumstantial evidence that Kamala haters can keep believing what they believe already, and others with more open minds can reasonably wonder if this might be a case of stolen fast-food valour after all.

For example, a job at McDonald’s seems like something Harris would have eagerly discussed in her two autobiographical books, which strain to present her as a plucky product of a humble upbringing. But neither book mentions it, even though, as the Free Beacon notes, her 2019 campaign biography These Truths We Hold “devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working-class and assails the service industry’s ‘starvation wages'”. Not brandishing such a shiny autobiographical nugget in this discussion does seem uncommonly modest for a presidential candidate.

And why have we heard nothing from Harris’s sister Maya, the Stanford-trained lawyer who earlier worked on Harris’s campaign, and who’d have been a teenager when Kamala was supposedly working at Mickey D’s? Smells generate some of the strongest memories, and making fast-food french fries is notorious for how it leaves people smelling. One of my best friends in high school worked at our town’s A&W, the chain of drive-in hamburger joints famous for its root beer. I remember him smelling exactly like french fries when he got off work. Does Maya Harris remember her big sister smelling like french fries when she got home from her summer job at McDonald’s?

No one seems to have asked her, which points to a depressing side-issue. Uncertainty around Harris’s summer job in 1983 has presented a sort of test to elite media, and they have failed. With Trump rushing in to exploit this uncertainty and rake in a huge pile of free and favourable publicity, while littering the ground with his own lies and partial-truths, they’ve responded in a way that exhibits, as if in pathological symptoms and uncontrollable tics, a chronic syndrome in their journalism. A New York Times article from last Sunday is a prominent example. Its sub-headline says: “Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did.” This is echoed in the body of the piece: “Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches.” In these formulations, a political campaign’s mere assertion and one woman’s memory of something Harris’s mother told her at some unspecified time count as proof, while all the circumstantial evidence amassed by the Washington Free Beacon doesn’t even count as evidence.

And you can see the Times trying to sculpt their one piece of substantiating evidence so that it looks more solid and imposing than it really is. The article states that “Waanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.” This makes it sound as if Ms Kagan has conveyed a direct contemporaneous memory of Harris and her job. But in the next paragraph we read, “Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.” So, Harris’s close friend Wanda Kagan knows that Harris worked at McDonald’s because, at some later date, Harris’s mother told her? Not Harris herself? This seems like the sort of curious, murky account of a live issue that a self-respecting reporter would try to clarify a little further, but the Times presents the Wanda Kagan story as if it settles things, as if there’s no journalistic need to corroborate that story by, say, contacting Maya Harris and probing her olfactory memories, asking whether she remembers a smell of french fries from the summer of 1983.

In a long thread on X, conservative media reporter Drew Holden includes this article among a startling number of examples of news outlets giving snide, niggling, gratuitously skeptical commentary as they reported on Trump’s McDonald’s performance. Holden portrays these as “outrage porn”, but, with a few exceptions, it’s not really outrage we’re seeing. It’s fretfulness and worry. It’s helplessness. As I said above, it’s panic.

Theoretically at least, there was a journalistic balance to strike when Trump pulled his McDonald’s stunt. The press could have done its reporting from the sidelines, quoting Trump’s accusation that Harris lied about working at McDonald’s while noting that such a strong accusation should be backed up by something like proof. They could have, as they have done, reported that Trump himself openly lied when he said that McDonald’s has confirmed his claim about Harris. They could even have reported some of Trump’s odd behaviour has he pretended to fry those sliced potatoes. They might have described his awkward movements, his odd and yet familiar fixation, before all that boiling grease, with the size of the adoring crowds surrounding the humble restaurant. They might have related how he made a big, germaphobic deal about the special technology McDonald’s has for making sure those sacred potatoes are never touched, never despoiled, by “the human hand”.

They could have done this while also conceding that Harris’s claim about working at McDonald’s is indeed light on corroboration. Instead, they’ve seemed desperate to put themselves in the action, to undo Trump’s (sleazy and undeserved, if also enviable and impressive) PR triumph through sarcasm and bad framing, while pretending that obvious questions about Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s story have been answered, when they haven’t. The media have, thus, looked like they’re trying to weaken Trump and protect Harris. They’ve looked, in other words, like they’re a little freaked out, a little scared that a faithful telling of this McDonald’s story might help him win. It’s not exactly the Hunter Biden laptop story, but it kind of feels like the Hunter Biden laptop story.

I have my own suspicions about Harris’s claim, and I’m obviously a little disgusted with how the press has handled it. But I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She had no way to foresee the Trumpian Kung Fu she was opening herself up to when, truthfully or not, she claimed she once had a low-status fast food job. The most clairvoyant politician or political strategist could not have anticipated what Donald Trump, with his greasy and smelly methods, would make of the greasy and smelly mythos of the lowly job at McDonald’s.

It’s a sorry episode all around, but maybe it’ll have an upside. Maybe all the political bragging about having a job at McDonald’s will kill the stigma that attaches to this essential work. And maybe, in the future, on their way to higher education and better jobs and happy lives as successful adults, some larger number of young men will end up flippin’ burgers and dunkin’ fries at Mickey D’s, instead of trying their finite luck as ghetto hustlers.