Mitt Romney’s Dad Got Corporate Handouts: Free McDonald’s For Life

Mitt Romney/Twitter

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Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is too often accused of being stiff, awkward, soulless, hardly the type of guy you’d want to drink a beer with. (Romney, like most Mormons, doesn’t drink alcohol, anyway.)

And so it’s news when Romney offers up a new detail, however minor, about his personal life or childhood, as he did Wednesday with a group of donors in Chicago. At a fundraiser, ABC News reported, Romney recounted how, as a kid, he used to rifle through a sock drawer belonging to his dad, former Michigan governor George Romney, and how little Mitt once struck gold in that drawer:

You know how boys liked to go through their dad’s top drawer, just to sort of see what he has in there, maybe find an old coin he might not miss or whatever.

I found a little paper card, a little pink card, and it said this entitles George W. Romney to a lifetime of a hamburger, a shake, and French fries at McDonald’s. It was signed by the hand of [former McDonald’s executive] Ray Kroc. My dad had done a little training lesson or whatever for McDonald’s when there was just a handful of restaurants and I saw this thing and was like, ‘This is a gold mine, Dad! What are you doing?’ So I had it laminated. My dad, as you know, would go almost every day to a McDonald’s restaurant and get either a hamburger or a fish filet sandwich. And he would present this little card and of course the person behind the counter would look and say, ‘Well, what is that?’ They’d never seen something like that, but he said it was never turned down. They always honored it.

George Romney’s love of McDonald’s hamburgers and fish filets doesn’t seem to have worn off on his youngest son. Mitt’s preferred fast-food joint apparently is Carl’s Jr.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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