The Right’s Increasingly Pathetic Attacks Against Tim Walz, Explained

With his selection as candidate for vice president, Tim Walz has burst onto the national political scene as one of the most folksy and estimable Democratic standard bearers in recent memory. Walz’s background includes having been a teacher, a football coach, a National Guardsman, a member of Congress, and one of the most accomplished progressive governors in the country.

In the aftermath of the Democratic convention in Chicago, Walz is the the only member of either ticket with a positive approval rating, and his polling (42 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable) is almost precisely the inverse of Trump’s drag-on-the-ticket running mate, J.D. Vance (44 percent unfavorable, 38 percent favorable.)

So naturally the MAGA movement wants to take Walz down a peg.

Conservatives are furiously targeting Walz for what they allege is a pattern of exaggerating his credentials — even going so far as to allege “stolen valor” over the way Walz has described his military service. A public figure since 2006, Walz has occasionally magnified his accomplishments. But the right-wing drive to establish a “pattern of prevarications” that “stretches back almost two decades” — as the the Free Beacon ominously described it this week — is backfiring as over-eager wingnuts try to frame Walz for fake faux pas like posing with the wrong dog.

Below we unpack the supposed Walz “scandals” drubbed up by the MAGA set, and the mundane reality behind the screamer headlines.

Not So Outstanding?

This week, the right-wing outlet Free Beacon tried to make hay out of a claim in a 2006 Walz press packet that touted him as having been named 1993’s “Outstanding Young Nebraskan” by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce. The Free Beacon pointed to a contemporaneous letter by the Chamber saying it had never bestowed such an honor. The story traveled widely among right-wing media, including to Fox News, the New York Post and Newsmax.

A Big Gotcha?

It turns out that Walz had, in fact, received the stated honor, just from the state’s Junior Chamber of Commerce, instead. Moreover, the Walz 2006 congressional campaign had promptly updated the campaign materials to correct for what they described at the time as a “typographical error.”

“Stolen Valor”

A major component of the far-right attack on Walz is the allegation that he has exaggerated his military credentials to a degree that constitutes “stolen valor.” Bashing Democrats who served honorably in uniform is a go-to attack by GOP partisans, with the “Swift Boating” of 2004 nominee John Kerry being the most egregious example.

The reality is that Walz served for more than 20 years in the National Guard, was eligible for retirement in 2001, chose to re-enlist after 9/11, deployed to Europe to support the war in Afghanistan, and then retired when he decided to run for Congress in 2005. Over his career, Walz rose to the rank of command sergeant major, one of the highest positions an enlisted soldier can achieve.

The attacks on Walz’s service are three-fold — and all quite thin.

First, right wingers have pounced on a clip from Walz in 2006 saying that he was a “retired command sergeant major.” This can be spun as an exaggeration, on a technicality. While Walz served in that rank, he reportedly did not complete coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy to retain it, so his rank at retirement was instead master sergeant.

Second, right wingers — most notably Vance — have seized on a clip of Walz at a 2018 campaign event calling to limit access to assault rifles. Walz said, circuitously: “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried — in war is the only place where those weapons are at.” Walz was speaking a mile a minute, so the pause got lost, making it sound as if he were claiming to have carried weapons “in war,” which suggests combat experience that Walz does not have. The Harris campaign, which initiated the confusion with its paraphrase of Walz’s remarks, has since said Walz “misspoke.” (In a signal of how desperate the MAGA set are to make this line of attack stick, other right wingers have shouted “stolen valor” over an entirely accurate C-Span clip in which Walz describes: “I deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. My battalion proved base security throughout the European theater from Turkey to England in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan.”)

Third, right wingers have attacked the timing of Walz’s retirement after 24 years of service. Walz submitted his retirement papers to run for Congress shortly before his unit was called up to serve in Iraq. Trump allies have attempted to turn this career change, by a man then in his 40s with a small daughter at home, into a tale of abandoning the troops — as though Walz didn’t continue his public service by winning a House seat and rising to become the ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee and a member of the Armed Services Committee.

Manhandling Gus?

Libs of TikTok and other right-wing commentators have tried to make a video of Walz yanking of his son Gus as they walked on stage following his Chicago convention speech into something strange or ominous — despite the fact that the video plainly showed the father trying to keep his son from crashing his head into a teleprompter, which his daughter Hope then dodges from the other side.

IVF “Liar”

Walz has spoken openly in recent weeks about the “hell” of struggling with infertility as he and his wife Gwen tried to have kids. Walz has described how they “used IVF to start a family,” and on the stump he’s denounced far-right attempts to limit access to fertility treatments, insisting “this gets personal for me and my family.”

Far-right critics, and some pedants in the media, have tried to make hay over the fact that the procedure that helped Walz and his wife conceive was technically IUI — intrauterine insemination — rather than IVF or in-vitro fertilization. J.D. Vance posted on X, formerly Twitter: “It came out that Tim Walz had lied about having a family via IVF. Who lies about something like that?”

This is asshattery. In truth, “IVF” is often used as a catch-call for assistive reproductive technology including IUI. Both procedures are performed at what would colloquially be called an IVF clinic. The procedures are also related, with IUI often being the first treatment in a plan that progresses to IFV proper.

IUI typically involves medically stimulating the mother’s egg release and then introducing the father’s healthiest sperm into the uterus via a catheter, seeking to create embryos. In IFV, both sperm and egg are harvested from the parents, and fertilized embryos, created outside the body, are then delivered via a catheter to the uterus. Both procedures are targets of far-right hate because they create embryos that may not result in pregnancy. IVF is generally regarded as more problematic by abortion foes, because unused or unhealthy embryos are sometimes discarded.

Petting the Wrong Dog

The overwrought attacks on Walz revealed their preposterous essence on Monday when right wingers — from TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk, to GOP Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, to Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle, to MAGA commentator DC Draino — baselessly attacked Walz for posing for a photo with a dog he met at a dog park that was not his own dog Scout, a black lab mix.

These MAGA Mensa candidates had worked themselves into a lather about Walz “lying about his dog” because Walz mentioned Scout in the caption of the photo of the befriended doggo — as though he were somehow trying to pass this scruffy brown mutt off as Scout. (Don’t try to make it make sense.)

The ridiculous of the right’s scandal mongering over Walz appears to be backfiring, because it has now become a left-wing meme, a few of which you can enjoy below:

Too Cozy With China?

Walz long had an interest in China over the course of his career as an educator. He taught English there and has led numerous student trips to the country. MAGA opportunists have attempted to twist Walz’s affection for the place and its people into a conspiracy theory about him being controlled by China’s authoritarian government. Tapping into xenophobia, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) has called on the FBI to investigate Walz’s connections to China, insisting, “The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) has also attempted to attack Walz — using ammunition that blew up in his face. “It’s very strange. He got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square,” Johnson said — inadvertently highlighting the fact that Walz was expressing solidarity with the victims of the deadly 1989 crackdown on democratic reformers. Walz has long been a critic of China’s human rights abuses, including more recently in Hong Kong, and has also palled around with a prominent enemy of Beijing, the Dalai Lama.

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