By MICHELLE L. PRICE and MARC LEVY
FEASTERVILLE-TREVOSE, Pa. (AP) — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump manned the fry station at a McDonalds in Pennsylvania on Sunday before staging an impromptu news conference, answering questions from reporters through the drive-thru window.
After an employee showed Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in the oil, the former president took his turn and even helped fill some takeout bags after a bit.
“It requires great expertise, actually, to do it right and to do it fast,” Trump said with a grin.
The visit came as he stepped up his criticism of Democrat Kamala Harris and dug into his claim — spread without offering evidence — that she never worked at the fast-food chain while in college — an experience she has cited during her campaign.
“I do appreciate it a little more. You say, ‘Give me french fries.’ I’ll never forget this experience.” Trump said.
In the exchange with reporters, he was asked about whether he would respect the results of the Nov. 5 election, among other topics. Trump, who still refuses to accept that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, has said he wants a victory this year to be so overwhelming that the results are “too big to rig.”
Trump visited a McDonalds in Feasterville-Trevose, which is part of Bucks County, a swing area northeast of Philadelphia. Trump is a longtime aficionado, partial to Big Macs and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches; his staff often picks up McDonald’s and serves it on his plane.
Later Sunday, Trump is attending an evening town hall in Lancaster before catching the Pittsburgh Steelers home game against the New York Jets.
The McDonald’s owner, Derek Giacomantonio said, “It is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community.”
He said in a statement that was why he accepted Trump’s request “to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s.”
As Trump put it reporters when he got off his plane: “I really wanted to do this all my life.”
Trump has fixated in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she held in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while attending Howard University in Washington. Trump says the vice president has “lied about working” there, but not offered evidence for saying that.
It’s latest example of his longtime strategy to seize on conspiracy theories and question the credentials of his political opponents.
Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s during Trump’s visit. Authorities cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.
Harris, who was a California prosecutor before becoming a senator and vice president, raises her McDonald’s experience as a way to show she understands working-class struggles.
“When Trump feels desperate, all he knows how to do is lie,” Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams said Sunday. “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because he was handed millions on a silver platter, only to blow it.”
In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college.
“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said. “I worked there as a student.”
Harris also said: “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs.”
Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told reporters Saturday that Trump’s stop would show he “connects with hard-working Americans.”
Harris’ campaign did not immediately have a comment on Trump’s McDonald’s visit.
Representatives for McDonald’s did not respond to a message about whether the company had employment records for one of its restaurants 40 years ago.
Trump has promoted false and baseless claims throughout his campaign
It’s far from the first time that Trump has promoted baseless claims. Most notably, he claims falsely that he lost to Biden due to voter fraud. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.
Trump has long gone after opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities.
Before he ran for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not an American citizen and therefore was ineligible to be president. Trump used it to raise his own political profile, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and five years after Obama did so, Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.
During his first run for president, Trump repeated a tabloid’s claims that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, who was born in Cuba, had links to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz and Trump competed for the party’s 2016 nomination.
In January of this year, when Trump was facing Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, in the Republican primary, he shared on his social media network a post with false claims that Haley’s parents were not citizens when she was born, therefore making her ineligible to be president.
Haley is the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, making her automatically a native-born citizen and meeting the constitutional requirement to run for president.
Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on the claims about McDonald’s four decades ago is a “puzzling detour,” but that Trump is “not above throwing anything on the wall to see if it sticks.”
“When Donald Trump isn’t talking about the economy and illegal immigration, he’s off topic about the things that people care about,” Marson said.
Marson suggested that Trump would be better off talking about the economy and immigration, not something he called “off topic.”
“I don’t think there’s an undecided voter out there that will respond or that will make their decision based on whether or not Kamala Harris actually worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s,” Marson said.
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