Following Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, former Attorney General Eric Holder—who was charged with leading Harris’s VP vetting—reflected upon the accelerated timeline for the selection process: “It was daunting, but the time was so short that you didn’t have time to get too anxious about it,” Holder said. “It was only at the conclusion that you said, ‘I hope we got everything.’ And I think we did.”
But now, several weeks after Holder officially gave Walz the green light, it has become abundantly clear that his vetting office did not, in fact, get everything. As a result, Tim Walz has quickly emerged not only as the single most radical vice presidential nominee in American history, but also as a serial liar, embellisher, and fabulist whose track record of falsehoods and deceits puts some of Washington’s most notorious fibbers to shame.
Seemingly every week that he has stood alongside Harris on the campaign trail, Walz has become embroiled in a new scandal perpetrated by his own lies—calling into question his commitment to being truthful and transparent to the very voters he is seeking to bring over to his side.
Perhaps the most notorious instance of Walz’s barefaced duplicity has been his dishonesty surrounding his military service.
In 2018, Walz referred to “weapons of war” that he ostensibly “carried in war” as a servicemember. However, as many were quick to note, there is just one problem with Walz’s claim: he never served in a combat zone. His false assertion that he “carried” “weapons of war,” therefore, is nothing more than a brazen embellishment meant to mislead American citizens about the nature of his service.
Walz has also faced criticism for abandoning his fellow servicemembers right as they were preparing to deploy to Iraq. He falsely claimed he did not know his unit was being deployed even though his own press release signaled that he did in fact know.
As J.D. Vance and other Republicans have repeatedly clarified, they are not attacking Walz for his service—but rather for lying about it. For someone running to be the Vice President of the United States, flagrant dishonesty about his military service should be disqualifying.
In Walz’s and Harris’s recent CNN interview, Walz laughably attempted to chalk up his stolen valor claims to his “grammar” not always being “correct”—implying that, despite his flagrant dishonesty, his “heart” is in the right place.
Walz has also come under fire for falsely claiming that his wife received in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments in a shameful attempt to attack pro-life Republicans. In reality, Gwen Walz used intrauterine insemination, a wildly different fertilization treatment, to conceive their children.
This is just the beginning of Walz’s laundry list of lies, mistruths, and embellishments. During his 2006 congressional campaign, Walz stated on his website that he received an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce for his work with the business community. The only problem? He never received such an award. “We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce,” a letter from the chamber’s president read.
Walz’s 2006 campaign also spread lies about details surrounding his arrest for driving under the influence in 1995, bizarrely insisting that Walz had not actually been under the influence at the time of his arrest – even though Walz admitted in court that he had been drinking when law enforcement pulled him over.
Reports have also indicated that Walz lied about his political origin story at a George W. Bush rally in 2004. Furthermore, one of the Harris-Walz campaign’s primary rallying cries thus far has been their elevation of Walz’s status as a “coach”—with the campaign going so far as to produce t-shirts and signs brandishing the word “COACH” in all caps. In reality, however, he was a volunteer assistant coach who was not responsible for, as Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar suggested at the Democratic National Convention, turning “a team that was 0-27 into state champions.”
In the end, all of Walz’s lies are part and parcel of a systematic effort by the Harris campaign, the corporate media, and Walz himself to portray him as, in the words of one left-wing analyst, “America’s dad, America’s football coach… [and] America’s teacher” with a folksy, “centrist” Midwestern attitude. But voters of all political persuasions are coming to see that Walz’s faux “likeable” persona is nothing more than a smokescreen meant to cover his extraordinary radicalism on nearly every policy issue.
Given that Walz has been in the national spotlight for less than a month, the public may well be in for more rounds of shocking revelations in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
