Who knew a simple campaign appearance at McDonalds could pay off so well for Donald Trump? What should have been a one-day wonder of a story instead got Super-Sized by hostile media and Democrats:

• Did you know that Donald Trump staged a campaign event? 
• Trump didn't really work the fryer! 
• That location got dinged in a health inspection! 
• Trump cosplayed a worker and demeaned them!

That last accusation came from Tim Walz, recently seen cosplaying a hunter. 

At any rate, the media and Democrats can't get enough of the Big MAGA. The New York Times got involved earlier this week in an attempt to fact check an accusation from Trump that Kamala Harris lied about her claim to have had a summer job at a McDonalds in Alameda as as a college student. The NYT claimed that a witness had come forward from Harris' youth to claim that she heard the story from Harris' mother. The Times also implied that Wanda Kagan had not been in close touch recently with Harris:

But The New York Times interviewed a friend who had known Ms. Harris as a teenager and remained in touch with the family for years afterward. Wanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.

Answering questions by email, Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago. Ms. Kagan said she herself had also worked at one of the fast-food chain’s many franchises in those years.

“That’s what us regular folks did,” Ms. Kagan wrote. Still, she indicated that it had not been a frequent topic of conversation for Ms. Harris. “We didn’t talk much about our McDonald’s days back then,” she said.

"For years afterward" implies that the families fell out of contact at some point. As it turns out, though, Kagan and Harris have remained in close contact. So close, in fact, that Kagan acts as a campaign surrogate for Harris, a fact not disclosed by the NYT but uncovered by the Free Beacon today:

What the Times did not tell its readers is that Kagan is a full-throated Harris supporter who has appeared alongside the vice president at several campaign events. She also served as a surrogate for her old friend on television during the Democratic National Convention.

"It’s an emotional and chilling ride, and I’m just overwhelmed with happiness for my friend, and I’m happy to be alive to be able to witness her now fighting for the people of America," Kagan told MSNBC during the Democratic convention in August.

Kagan is the first living person to step forward in the seven weeks since a Free Beacon investigation first raised doubts about Harris's claim to say that Harris worked at McDonald's. Kagan's claim, that she heard about McDonald's from Harris's mother, cannot be verified because Harris's mother is dead. To date, the Harris campaign itself has not produced a single person with firsthand knowledge of Harris's McDonald's job, other than Harris herself.

Are we to believe that the New York Times didn't know Kagan worked as a campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris? Kagan had appeared in two other NYT stories before the convention, after all. Shortly after Joe Biden's debate debacle, the NYT included Kagan in their July 5 "The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris" profile by disclosing that Kagan was the friend who told Harris about sexual abuse by Kagan's stepfather. A month later, Kagan figured prominently in another sympathetic NYT profile of Harris that highlighted their Canadian upbringing. And Kagan appeared on TV to shill for Harris, for crying out loud, even if it was just MSNBC.

That doesn't make her story false, of course, but it does change the context of the sourcing. It goes from Old Friend Corroborates Story to Campaign Surrogate Offers Hearsay. And while the NYT goes to great lengths to equate this to "birtherism" (a term I co-coined, by the way), they also admit far into their article that this claim came suspiciously late in Harris' career after never mentioning it at all:

In subsequent years, Ms. Harris talked so little about her long-ago job at McDonald’s that even some of her friends and close aides did not know she had worked there. She also did not mention the job in her memoir, although she talked extensively about her time at Howard and the various jobs mentioned on that old résumé.

The first time Ms. Harris appears to have prominently brought up her summer job was during her first presidential campaign in 2019, as she joined striking McDonald’s workers on a Las Vegas picket line calling for a $15 minimum wage.

That certainly seems suspicious, doesn't it? Literally the first time Harris appeared to mention it to anyone was to glom onto a labor dispute as a presidential candidate. Even Kagan doesn't claim that Harris told her about it, but that supposedly Harris' mother did. 

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised either way about Harris' McDonald's story. I view it with the same skeptical lens in all directions that I had about Corn Pop, given Joe BIden's tendency for fabulism and plagiarism, but Corn Pop turned out to be real. That might be the case with Harris and McDonald's too, but ... so what? Even if Harris did actually work at Mickey D's as a teen, so did practically everyone else as well. 

The controversy over this and Trump's recent shift in Bucks County, PA just keeps that story alive, along with all of the benefits of it. Democrats and the media would have been far better advised to ignore it rather than to keep it in the headlines for four straight days. What looked like a fun and meaningless campaign stunt has turned into an epic troll, sending all of Trump's opponents into shrieking hysterics when a yawn would have sufficed. 

As Casey Stengel once lamented of the '62 Mets ... can't anyone here play this game?