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.
(@Joanie46513368 / X)
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:
(Reganfamily.ca)
The original image appeared on a website dedicated to a family's personal photos. The name of the young woman in the pic was Suzanne Bernier. According to the caption, she was a shift manager at McDonald's. And though there was no date listed, the snapshot appears to have been taken in the early 1980s. According to the website, Suzanne Bernier is now deceased.
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 found on a left-leaning page devoted to politics, 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:
(Progress Matters / Facebook)
It's more likely that the image debuted in this X post (archived) dated Oct. 24, 2024:
(@TheInfiniteDude / X)
Not only did the X user, @TheInfiniteDude, state in the post that the image was fake, he stated in a follow-up post (archived) that it was the second time Snopes had fact-checked "a hoax I made." We've reached out to @TheInfiniteDude seeking confirmation that he was in fact the image's creator.
For more, see Snopes' ongoing coverage of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, including Trump's own McDonald's photo op and Harris' claim that Trump will sign a national abortion ban.