At what point does deference to a public official go from being polite to being shameless?
Liberal media has meltdown over Trump's 'first day' working at McDonald's
The 'Outnumbered' panel discussed the media's reaction to former President Trump's appearance at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania.
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are sparring over whether Harris ever worked at a McDonald’s restaurant during her college years. This dispute reveals the standard of proof the media will henceforth use if Harris wins the election.
Any statement that President Harris utters will be treated as gospel truth, and any critic will be presumed scurrilous if not bigoted. This echoes how the media ridiculed the damning evidence disclosed in October 2020 from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
On Sunday, Trump worked briefly at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania to draw attention to the controversy. The New York Times responded with an article headlined, "Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job That Became a Trump Line of Attack."
Former President Trump works the drive-thru line at a McDonalds restaurant on Oct. 20, 2024, in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Except that the Times found no real evidence that Harris actually worked at McDonald’s. Regardless, the Times railed that "Trump’s seeding of doubts about Ms. Harris’s story" was "insidious and outside the lines of traditional fair play in politics." Because Harris is a female, or what? When did a presidential candidate become exempt from scrutiny about belated revelations of youthful virtue? Trump did not hit Harris’ McDonald’s job claim until she made it Exhibit A of her middle-class pedigree.
TRUMP'S MCDONALD’S VISIT SERVED UP FOUR BRILLIANT POLITICAL MOMENTS
Harris has refused to be interviewed in-depth regarding the McDonald’s job. The New York Times stated that Harris’ campaign only disclosed the year and location of the specific McDonald’s at issue but "it has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there." The Times noted, "The campaign did not make any of Ms. Harris’s friends or family members available for interviews about their recollections of her experience there." Oh bother, said the Times’ reporters.
Do we know if Harris worked more than one day at the Golden Arches? Maybe showing up for a single eight-hour shift would suffice to burnish Harris’s middle-class halo in perpetuity, at least for her media cheerleaders.
The Times conceded that Harris never prominently mentioned working at McDonald’s until 36 years later, when she was campaigning for the presidency in 2019 and joined a Las Vegas strike by McDonald’s workers. She never mentioned the job in her two autobiographies and did not list it on a 1987 job application. Those glaring omissions did not stop the Times from putting doubts about that McDonald’s job in the same odious category as disbelief that former President Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Leftist Washington Post reporter Philip Bump looked into the matter and admitted that "I was able to find no evidence of her employment" at McDonald’s. No problem: Bump still condemned Trump.
Bump concluded, "There is no reason to think that Harris didn’t work at McDonald’s in 1983 and... every reason to think that Trump’s suggestion that she didn’t is offered in bad faith and without evidence." The only fact necessary to exonerate Harris is that she is the Democratic Party presidential nominee.
Snopes.com, which often leans left, investigated and found "no tangible evidence of Harris working at McDonald's as a college student. We reached out to Harris' campaign, as well as McDonald's headquarters, seeking tax records or other proof… such as a uniform or name tag. We also reached out to Harris' sister, Maya, as well as a close friend from Howard University seeking comment… to confirm the story, with no luck." Snopes labeled her job claim as "unproven."
Harris could settle this controversy with a simple request to the Social Security Administration to release her 1983 earnings statement. But Harris has neither done that nor provided any other facts to buttress her claims. Maybe the media presumes Kamala has a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself by revealing evidence of her own whoppers?
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At what point does deference to a prominent public official go from being polite to being shameless? Nowadays, withholding evidence is the only proof of innocence required in Washington.
Unfortunately, similar media shenanigans are helping the Biden administration shroud scandals till after Election Day. Americans won’t learn the hard facts about allegations on Tim Walz's connections to the Chinese Communist Party, insider machinations on the illegal immigrant tsunami, the full details on the Secret Service's failure to protect Trump, and federal censors muzzling countless Americans to safeguard the Biden administration’s reputation.
Will a Beltway Iron Curtain around crimes and outrages shift another presidential election? The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, aided and abetted by CIA officials, may have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Harris’s squirrelly claims on McDonald’s may not shift many votes directly though it may erode her "more trustworthy than Trump" polling advantage.
But the cumulative impact of the ongoing cover-ups could swing far more votes this year than did the Hunter laptop in 2020.
Kowtowing on the McDonald’s controversy signals that the media will likely be even more craven if Harris becomes the 47th president. Democratic politicians will be presumed innocent unless they publicly confess. But how many more cover-ups can self-government survive?
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Jim Bovard is the author of 12 books, including "Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty." He has written for The New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Playboy.
