Pete Buttigieg and Donald Trump
Pete Buttigieg and Donald Trump (Photo: US Gov/Shutterstock)

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is exploiting the fact that McDonald’s is in the news.

Vice President Kamala Harris has mentioned working briefly at McDonald’s in the 1980s while she was a student. She repeated this information as recently as August 31. She tweeted a photo of herself and her VP pick, Tim Walz. Her caption read, “Two middle-class kids. One, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at McDonald’s.

“The other, a son of the Nebraska plains, who spent summers on the farm. Only in America is it possible that the two of us would be running together all the way to the White House.”

Former President Donald Trump is known to love McDonald’s, even giving out the company’s food at past White House events. He clearly loathes the fact Harris has a connection to the famed “Golden Arches” and has decided she must be lying. He points to a lack of evidence to back up her claim.

Trump has repeatedly posted comments to social media calling her a liar. He has repeated this belief at rallies.

Minimum wage

Yesterday, Buttigieg decided to take advantage of the fact to raise some issues of his own.

“If we’re really going to have to talk about McDonald’s for a couple online news cycles, then let it be about how and why Trump and the GOP oppose increasing the minimum wage, but made sure to cut taxes for McDonald’s Corporation,” Buttigieg posted on X.

His tweet received over 32,000 likes.

Predictably, some Trump supporters blasted Buttigieg and repeated Trump’s claim that Harris was lying.

Others applauded the Transportation Secretary for highlighting minimum wage issues, or had their own pop at Trump.

McDonalds itself has made no statement regarding Harris’s claim that she once worked there. Conservative media outlets have obtained old resumes belonging to Harris when she started to apply for work after graduating college. They do not list McDonalds, but then again, not everyone lists all their summer jobs on their resume after they leave college.

Many others have pointed out it’s unlikely that McDonalds has kept employment records of summer staff from over 30 years ago.

Fact-check site Snopes did an investigation into Harris working at McDonald’s. It rated the claim neither fales nor true, but “unproven”.

“Aside from Harris’ testimony itself, there is no evidence (such as a photo, employment record or confirmation from a friend or family member) to independently verify the claim. We’ve reached out to Harris’ campaign and McDonald’s and we’ll update this report when, or if, we learn more.”

Another debate

In other election-related news, Kamala Harris has accepted a CNN invitation to take part in a second debate with Donald Trump in October. The former President has yet to respond but has indicated in the past he sees little reason to debate Harris again.

Most observers feel Harris won the first debate against Trump. Despite his lack of enthusiasm to take part, some close to the Trump campaign believe that ducking out may do Trump more harm than good.

“We’re in a very tight race. I like where President Trump stands,” said Steve Cortes, a former adviser to Trump, to The Hill. “However, I think any of us who do polling, who read polling carefully realize that this race is super, super tight and in that environment, I don’t think we should skip an opportunity to speak in front of a super large audience of Americans.”

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