McDonald’s Corp. has responded to Donald Trump’s visit to one of its restaurants in Pennsylvania on the weekend by revealing that it does not endorse such visits and is not taking sides in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
“McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president,” the company said in an internal message reported by Bloomberg News. “We are not red or blue — we are golden.”
The fast-food incident began after Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris started mentioning in campaign ads and interviews that she had worked at the golden arches when she was a student. The Trump campaign accused her of lying about her work experience. McDonald’s has said it doesn’t have complete records going back to the 1980s, when Harris said she worked there.
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, got into the fray when he revealed that he too had worked at McDonald’s, and had even been named an Employee of the Month.
Trump upped the ante on Sunday when he stopped by a McDonald’s location in Feasterville-Trevose, a suburb of Philadelphia, during which he cooked food, bagged fries and worked the drive-though, according to his campaign. The restaurant itself was closed to sit-in diners during Trump’s visit, the BBC reported. Pennsylvania is considered one of several key swing states that could determine the outcome of the election.
According to Bloomberg, McDonald’s internal message noted: “Upon learning of the former president’s request, we approached it through the lens of our core values: we open our doors to everyone.” The restaurant said it had also invited Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, for a visit.
In a statement to the BBC, Harris spokesman Ian Sams called Trump’s stunt a sign of “desperation.”
“All he knows how to do is lie,” Sams said. “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.”
Harris’s campaign said the vice-president worked the cash register, ice cream machine and fry machine at a McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in the summer of 1983, sending news outlets scrambling to fact-check the story.
The BBC said it spoke to an employee who remembered a lot of people who worked alongside him at the restaurant at that time but not Harris. However, the New York Times spoke to a high school friend of Harris, Wanda Kagan, who said she remembered her working at McDonald’s around that time.
More recently, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, wrote in his 2022 memoir, Breaking History, that when Trump contracted COVID-19 in 2020, ordering from the fast food chain signalled that he was on the way to recovery.
“I knew he was feeling better when he requested one of his favorite meals: a McDonald’s Big Mac, Filet-o-Fish, fries and a vanilla shake,” Kushner wrote.
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