Kamala in a McDonald’s Uniform is Fake

Claim: A photograph authentically shows a young Kamala Harris wearing a McDonald’s uniform.

Rating: Fake

ht/ woody

In late October 2024, with the Nov. 5 election looming, a photograph began making the social media rounds purporting to document a young Kamala Harris, now the U.S. vice president and Democratic candidate for president, wearing a McDonald’s uniform. 

The photo grabbed the internet’s attention thanks to an ongoing partisan dispute over the veracity of Harris’ repeated claim that she worked in a McDonald’s restaurant when she was a student. While there was no compelling reason to suppose she lied about it, a lack of corroborating evidence encouraged her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, and his supporters to claim Harris made up her story about working at McDonald’s.

The sudden appearance of the photograph was too serendipitous to be coincidental, of course. It was fake, a composite created by digitally editing an existing snapshot to replace the original subject’s face with that of Harris (or someone resembling Harris). 

We located the original, unmanipulated photo via a reverse image search on TinEye: 

So, who doctored the image and unleashed it on social media? Some anti-Harris accounts have claimed Harris’ presidential campaign came up with the hoax, but we’ve seen no evidence to support that conjecture. 

An early instance of the doctored image on X, appeared in the form of a screenshot of a Facebook post someone found on a left-leaning page devoted to politics called Progress Matters:

(Progress Matters / Facebook)

However, Progress Matters posted a statement (archived) on Oct. 26 saying the image (since removed from the Facebook page) had been posted by one of multiple contributors and had not been adequately vetted at the outset: