There are at least half a dozen major things Trump has bragged about from his past but not proven with any kind of documentation. Personally, I think Harris should offer a trade. “If my background as a teenage fast food worker is so important to you, I’ll release my pay stubs. In exchange, you release…”
My preference would be Trump’s college transcripts. Those will be a hoot.
And when he refuses, she just turns the tables. “Okay, so you say until I release the pay stubs, I didn’t work at McD’s. Fine. Until you release your transcripts, I say you barely scraped through in college and didn’t actually earn a degree.”
I think a greater share of swing voters respond to the dominance game. Leaders make demands, followers comply. If Harris does decide to respond to this nonsense, how she responds will matter more than what actually happened: any documents produced will receive the both-sides treatment by the mainstream media.
“You’re asking me about a place I worked as a teenager? Really? How about releasing your Willie Brown flight records, your Arlington National Cemetery video, your infrastructure plan, your “beautiful” health care plan, Melania’s immigration records, and your tax returns after that 10-year audit you’ve been suffering through? We’re waiting, Donald.”
I’m sure some coworkers of that time would remember being her colleague and have spoken up by now, given that their coworker is now U.S. vice president.
That being said, even if Kamala never worked at McDonald’s, Trump supporters have no business complaining about one or a few lies by Harris when their own candidate has had 13,000+ lies.
He didn’t release it until long after he was elected, though. I suspect it was because he wanted to stop it from becoming the focus of his reelection.
Sure, there is an argument to refute false rumors. But you don’t want to refute all of them, as refutations also grant legitimacy to the rumors. They paint them as things that needed debunking.
There’s a balancing act here in this. Is this really something anyone cares about? Not the fact she worked at McDonalds. Obviously that is something she thinks will help. But is there really anyone who needs proof? Or is it just one of those dumb rumors that will die on their own and no one needs to be reminded of?
Personally, I half agree with you. Go ahead and set it up, to get the ball rolling. But she doesn’t have to actually release it unless the balance tips over to where doing so would be more advantageous than not leading any credence to the rumor.
I would definitely say the birther stuff had much longer legs than this does. Though I admit the OP does make me think it’s worth watching this rumor to see if it actually matters.
Dude, the only people I remember by even their first name from my stint at McDonalds in the 1980’s is one of my bosses (who I very much disliked), my step-brother who I worked with briefly and a girl I had a crush on that I just now had to struggle to recall and I only could do that because she had a song association with her name that I recall us talking about.
Everybody else is a cipher. I can picture a few faces and remember some brief snippets of conversation, but no other names. It’s pushing close to 40 years ago now. Maybe you will remember perfectly who you worked with after that kind of time-span. As witnessed by multiple people in this thread, most of us cannot.
I worked at Papa John’s in the very early 2000s. I remember the manager’s face because he fired me after 8 months because he thought I was stoned (I had an eye infection). I couldn’t tell you his name if you had a gun to my head, nor could I make a single coworker, not even the one I had a crush on, or the guy we sold weed to in the cooler when we got a baggie in lieu of a tip. (I do remember he drove a newish Nissan Maxima with ridiculously large rims and everyone made fun of him for not lowering the suspension to offset the giant wheels.) I even met Papa John [Schnatter] and posed for publicity photos and training video material with him and a bunch of coworkers - this was the flagship corporate store so he visited twice a year.
I don’t remember the name of a single other coworker from my college years, even women I had sex with. Well, I remember one, but he was my roommate for two years so my remembering him has nothing to do with our working together.
I do remember the pharmacist who I worked under at Eckerd in high school, but only because her state license was on the wall and I saw it multiple times a day, and I had to write her name on pill count forms multiple times per day. Hope you’re doing well, Peggy!
All this became an issue about 14 years ago because the Florida Bar application requires a listing of every former employer, the address and dates of employment. So I requested my Social Security earnings record, and it turned out to be missing at least two employers, including the franchise pizza places where I worked before and after Papa John’s. I only worked at one place for a couple of months but I was at the other for at least six months. Both places are now closed but I was able to approximate the addresses by visiting the store fronts, and one was still listed on the Florida Division of Corporations website.
Anyway, I’m 15 years younger than Kamala and all this was during the early Internet age. The chances of her being able to find similar documentation are virtually nil.
And would they be willing to say it publicly, and face the backlash? The cousin of a friend was also sexually assaulted by Kavanough in college. She didn’t go public with that, because she didn’t want the death threats, etc., that would inevitably follow.
I liked it and would click the ‘like’ button if there were one. Hell, I’d hit subscribe and smash that bell too, or whatever exactly it is I’m always asked to do.
Thinking back to my first job, way back in the mists of 1987, well, that company doesn’t exist anymore. I think I can trace the shards of what was left through two or three corporate acquisitions, but I doubt there’s anyone left at the new parent company that would remember good old KVC, much less have access to the records. We made videocassettes of public domain or cheap to license movies, shorts and cartoons, and pumped that stuff out to the chain bookstores looking to grab a new source of revenue.
I would have said that I don’t remember a single name from that place, even though I hung out with a couple of the other pre-college summer hires a few times. But then I realized I do remember two people just because of the sheer poetry of their names. I had, more or less, two bosses. I present to you Dan Dunn and Dick Derr.
Coincidentally, my first job (also about forty years ago) was at a McDonald’s in Pasadena. I just checked- the location is no longer there. I can’t tell you the name of a single person I worked with there. Since it was a franchise, I would have no idea how to prove that I worked there back then… and I would see no reason to do so, because it’s completely irrelevant to my career. Were I President, I imagine it would be even more irrelevant.
I had a retail job in my early 20s (at a bookstore). Although I can picture the faces of the people I worked with, there’s only one whose name I remember.
Except, about 10 years ago I “friended” her on Facebook, and she didn’t remember me.
So, another anecdote showing how hard it would be to confirm a work history from decades ago.
She is busy and it’s not her job to irrefutably prove she worked at McDonalds 40 years ago. That’s her oppositions problem.
So I get it.
But she uses this story/anecdote to illustrate early struggles and common roots but to my knowledge doesn’t mention the location ever. That’s just an odd detail to leave out.
It’s possible to nitpick every detail of any story and find things that are “odd” or “don’t add up” when analyzed to the N-th degree.
When they are critical pieces of information, they’re worth following up on. Example - I got shot while saving 6 members of my platoon in an overseas war zone. That’s kind of a big deal and out of the normal experience of nearly everybody in the country.
When they’re “the location of this McDonald’s franchise where she worked 40 years ago”, that’s just a bizarre detail to get hung up on. That describes a large number of people her age, many of whom probably don’t remember all that many details about the experience.
I’m reasonably sure that with enough digging, it would be possible to verify one way or the other. But, as above, whether it is worth the effort is a different question. For similar “when I was a young’un working bad jobs”, it turns out I would have gotten a lot of details wrong, if I relied solely on my memory. The big details (the name of the store, my age (roughly), the city) I’d have gotten but very little else. And that just leads to a God of the Gaps problem where every tiny inconsistency (Oh, you said you worked with a Linda but there’s only a record of a Laura there) leads to more questions.
It would actually be an odd detail to awkwardly shoehorn into an anecdote: “When I was nineteen, I worked at the McDonalds on 4010 Alameda Ave in Oakland, CA, from February 12 to September 25, 1983.” But then, you’d be asking “Why is she being so specific about an inconsequential detail? Is there something else she’s trying to distract from?”
I’m trying to think of a situation where it would not be weird as fuck to specify which specific restaurant franchise you used to work at, and the only one that comes to mind is, “On a literal resume.” In no other situation would that be a normal or relevant thing to mention.
Although, even if it were remotely normal, for someone in Harris’ specific situation, it would make still sense for her not to do that, because the people who support her political opponents include a lot of crazy and dangerous people who do thinks like shoot up pizza restaurants that have the slightest tangential connection to prominent left wing politicians. The last thing her former employer (or, for that matter, whoever rented out the commercial space her former employer used to inhabit) needs is a lot of self-appointed right-wing “investigators” showing up trying to find some evidence that Harris is a space lizard, or whatever their current derangement is about.
But, again, “I used to work at the McDonalds at 7th and Oak in Shelbyville,” would be a completely bizarre detail to add in almost any context, doubly so when you’re speaking to a national audience who have no idea where Shelbyville even is, nor care.
This thread is the most I’ve heard about it. I also heard about it on a Discord where it was posted as “lol look at this dumb shit from MAGA”. It’s nothing like the birth certificate in scope and more like this week’s “Walz has TWO photos of him petting DIFFERENT dogs; which is the REAL dog, you liar??”