US election fact v fiction: Trump, Harris claims explained
Beat-ups. Hoaxes. Misinformation. These are the latest claims and counterclaims about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
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Last-minute lies, half-truths and outright conspiracy theories deployed to influence elections are as old as democracy itself.
The porky pies already seen in the US presidential election are as numerous as they are easily debunked; from Joe Biden’s “fine people on both sides”, or the threat of a “bloodbath” if Donald Trump loses, or Kamala Harris “turning black”. Beat-ups. Hoaxes. Misinformation. A Pinocchio nose by any other name smells as sour.
But it’s the claims and counterclaims dropped in the last month of a campaign that sow the most confusion and have the potential to change the course of who changes the curtains at the White House.
Here’s how to make sense of the 2024 election cycle’s attempts at the dreaded, sometimes comical, always consequential, October surprise.
CLAIM: Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonald’s in 1983 to fake a middle-class upbringing
After Donald Trump donned an apron to work at McDonald’s for “15 minutes more” than Kamala Harris ever did, the former president claimed Google’s CEO said it was “one of the single biggest events” they’d ever had.
The stunt was an attempt to boost allegations Ms Harris lied about working at the Golden Arches, which first surfaced in an investigation by the Washington Free Beacon.
In her decades-long public service career, Ms Harris made no mention of working at McDonald’s until she ran for president in 2019. It was not included in her two memoirs, in two biographies written about her, or in a post-college resumé. It was also absent from a 1987 job application to the Alameda County district attorney’s office, which required candidates to list every position held in the past 10 years.
In a statement, McDonald’s said “We and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s”.
COUNTERCLAIM: ‘I did fries’
The Harris campaign first responded to the claim in August, saying she “worked at McDonald’s to put herself through college”. That story was later finessed to say McDonald’s was a “summer job just to earn a bit more spending money”.
The campaign claims Ms Harris worked at the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, California, in 1983 at the cash register, french fry station and ice cream machine.
Beyond Ms Harris’ own statements and the campaign’s assurances, there has been no paystub, photo, or corroborating testimony from anyone with first-hand knowledge of the vice president working at McDonald’s.
The closest was second-hand knowledge from high school friend Wanda Kagan, from when Ms Harris lived 4000 km away in Montreal, Canada. Ms Kagan told The New York Times that Ms Harris’ mother, who died in 2009, had mentioned the summer job years earlier.
A viral photo purporting to show Ms Harris in a McDonald’s uniform, meanwhile, was revealed as a fake by its creator.
CLAIM: Donald Trump groped a model in ‘twisted game’ with Jeffrey Epstein
Former model Stacey Williams accused Donald Trump of groping her after being introduced by Jeffrey Epstein at Trump Tower in the 1990s.
In a call organised by a Kamala Harris lobby group, Ms Williams, now 56, alleged she met Mr Trump in 1992 when he put his hands “all over my breasts”.
“It became very clear then that he [Epstein] and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
Ms Williams, who said she dated Epstein for a few months, claimed Mr Trump groped her waist and buttocks, causing her to freeze on the spot.
She said she became “deeply confused” about what was happening, and she believed she saw Mr Trump and Mr Epstein smiling at each other.
“I had this sickening feeling that it was co-ordinated, that somehow I was rolled in there like a piece of meat for some kind of weird twisted game,” she told CNN.
The outlet spoke to three friends of Williams who said she told them about the incident in 2006, 2015 and 2018.
Ms Williams also claims Mr Trump wrote her an undated postcard featuring his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“Stacey, Your home away from home. Love, Donald,” the postcard said.
COUNTERCLAIM: ‘Fake news’ and ‘forgeries’
Trump’s national press secretary said in a statement the accusations “made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election are unequivocally false”.
Responding to the postcard, spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt argued the handwriting did not match Mr Trump’s handwriting, because it never happened.
“It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by Kamala Harris’ campaign to distract from the deeply concerning and newly unearthed allegations that the Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped’ his ex-girlfriend,” she added.
Ms Williams said that she was walking with Mr Esptein from his “brownstone on the upper east side, down Fifth Avenue” when he suggested seeing Mr Trump in 1993.
Mr Epstein’s townhouse was a gift from Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner, who transferred the title to Mr Epstein in 1996. Ownership was formally transferred in 2011 from a trust controlled by Wexner and Epstein to a Virgin Islands-based entity controlled solely by Epstein, according to The New York Times.
It was unclear if Mr Epstein had informal use of the townhouse at the time of Ms Williams’ claims, three years before he’s reported to have first received formal ownership of the property.
CLAIM: Dough Emhoff impregnated the nanny and slapped an ex-girlfriend
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff faced a series of allegations over his treatment of women before his marriage to Kamala Harris.
Mr Emhoff was first reported to have cheated on his first wife, Kerstin, with the family’s nanny Najen Naylor – who became pregnant with his child around 2008.
After they divorced and moved on, Mr Emhoff is alleged to have slapped an ex-girlfriend in the face for flirting with another man during a booze-fuelled altercation in 2012.
The woman, a “successful New York attorney”, made the allegations anonymously to The Daily Mail, producing travel itineraries, emails, and statements from friends to her claims.
“As I’m talking to him, Doug got out of the line, comes up, turns me around by my right shoulder. I’m completely caught off guard, I’m not bracing, I’m in four-inch heels, wearing a full-length gown and it’s between 2-3am.,” she was quoted as saying. “He slaps me so hard I spin around, and I’m in utter shock.”
“There had been no fight, no argument,” she added. “In that moment, his mask had dropped and I saw his dark side.”
COUNTERCLAIM: ‘Tough times’ and ‘distractions’
Mr Emhoff has admitted to the affair with his nanny and did not deny the allegations of slapping an ex-girlfriend.
In a comment to CNN after the report of an affair and love child was first published, Mr Emhoff said: “During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.”
While there has been speculation around an abortion, a miscarriage, or a secret birth, the fate of the pregnancy has not been revealed.
Mr Emhoff did not address allegations of “forcefully” striking an ex-girlfriend when asked on MSNBC to respond to “tabloid stories” about his personal life.
“We don’t have time to be pissed off, we don’t have time to focus on it, it’s all a distraction, it’s designed to get us off our game,” he said.
CLAIM: Kamala Harris’ pattern of plagiarism
Kamala Harris has faced several claims of plagiarism and fabulism over the course of her career, from copying large chunks of her book to passing off fake stories as real in Congressional testimony.
In the most recent claim, the presidential candidate was accused of lifting almost 1200 words from the 2007 Congressional testimony of Republican Paul Logli, the District Attorney of Winnebago in Illinois when she was San Francisco District Attorney.
It represented more than 80 per cent of her 1500-word submitted testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in support of the John R. Justice Act, a student loan repayment scheme for prosecutors.
When she was later attorney general in California in 2012, Ms Harris is alleged to have used an excerpt from a non-profit National Human Trafficking Hotline that published a series of vignettes “representative of the types of calls” on its website.
The sex trafficking story, from Polaris Project, was “for informational purposes only” and had changed key details like names, locations, and other information.
In that instance, Ms Harris attributed the story as “courtesy of” the hotline, but copied it “verbatim” without acknowledging the story was fictionalised, according to the Beacon.
She was also alleged to have lifted large chunks of her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, according to Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Dr Stefan Weber.
He said the 248-page book, written during Ms Harris’ campaign for California attorney general, reproduced language “verbatim” from places like news websites, Wikipedia and Martin Luther King Jr.
COUNTERCLAIM: Sloppy writing is not the same as malicious plagiarism
James Singer, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, brushed off the allegations as a partisan attack from “right wing operatives”.
“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the vice president clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” he said.
While Ms Harris has not personally responded to the claims of plagiarising Republican congressional testimony, the author, Mr Logli, said her copied portions were more likely a result of cutting corners at the National District Attorneys Association.
“If the statements were very alike, I don’t think it’s an act of plagiarism as much as it was a case of relying on stuff people who helped write the statement cut and paste,” he told the UK’s Telegraph. “They probably cut corners because they were overstretched.
“They probably should have advised Kamala about what I said before the Senate and they probably should have changed things around, but that’s staff responsibility.”
Plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey reviewed the examples for his website, PlagiarismToday, and said the pattern was “problematic”, though it fell short of negligence by Ms Harris.
“While there are problems with this work, the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud,” he said.
CLAIM: Donald Trump praised Hitler and is a fascist
Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, retired US Marine General John Kelly, told The New York Times he considered the former president a fascist.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Mr Kelly also claimed that Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things too.’”
The Atlantic, meanwhile, added that Mr Trump privately told two people at The White House: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
A day after the explosive remarks were published, Harris’s campaign arranged a press call with retired military figures who backed up Kelly’s assessment and warned that a second Trump presidency would have far fewer democratic guardrails than his first term.
COUNTERCLAIM: ‘I’m the opposite of a Nazi’
Donald Trump repeatedly denied the reports, saying in various responses that he “never said it” and that he’s the “opposite of a Nazi”.
On Mr Kelly’s comments, the substance of the allegations isn’t new. The former general made the claims as background briefings for books in the past, but put his name to them on the record for the first time in The New York Times interview.
On The Atlantic story, like The New York Times piece, there’s as much evidence to prove Mr Trump made the comments as there is to prove he did not. That is; nothing beyond the competing statements that it did or did not happen.
But The Atlantic piece also contained another allegation that has been credibly disputed by multiple third parties. The Atlantic claimed Mr Trump told his then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, not to pay for the funeral of murdered soldier Vanessa Guillén, adding that: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f---ing Mexican!”
Mr Meadows denied the claim, saying that the US government “did right” by Ms Guillén. And Ms Guillén’s sister, Mayra Guillén, added that the Atlantic was exploiting her sister’s death for politics.
“President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa,” she said.
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Originally published as US election fact v fiction: Trump, Harris claims explained
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