Trump & Vance Throw Everything at the Walz … but Nothing’s Sticking

GOP unable to figure out one Walz thing to focus on

Aug. 8: Walz otherizes Vance … Trump mum on Wall Street … Swift Boat 2024 … Vance’s wife to the rescue …

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In the first 24 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris named Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, their opponents have tried to hit him with at least three four five distinct attacks, all of which seem to be fizzling.

First there was the obligatory, perfunctory, lazy-ass “He’s a Communist” boilerplate, which should’ve been easy since Walz is on record defending socialism. But not a lot of people give a shit about socialism when they’re still nostalgic for their socialist Kenyan president.

Then Walz and Harris tanked the stock market, an attack which fizzled even before the markets bounced back the following day. (That roller coaster ride probably isn’t over, so we’ll see if the attack comes back.)

And now they’re trying to Swift Boat Walz. Which also already shows signs of failing.

But where are they on all the supposed Walz policy vulnerabilities that made Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) The Official Choice of Savvy Political Pundits™?

Former Pres. Donald Trump and 1.5-year Senator JD Vance (R-OH), who’s never even served in a majority, have yet to coalesce around a specific attack on specific policies or programs of Walz’s. Why? Because people freaking loved them.

Which is why Walz kept getting re-elected in a red district. And is a lot more popular with his voters than Pres. Joe Biden is.

Why do people love Walz’s policies? A few reasons. Mostly, in toto they help everyone.

Which means he can help specific people, too. Putting tampons in all the bathrooms. Extending driver’s licenses and health care to undocumented immigrants not just so that everyone is safer and healthier, but so that those individual actual humans are, too. 

These are specific policies that have drawn GOP criticism. But, again, not sticking. Mostly because Walz has no shame or fear about them. Walz isn’t afraid of others, so he’s not afraid of helping them, even if that means embracing change. Which he’s also not afraid of.

That’s why his most potent attack line against Republicans isn’t that they’re evil or corrupt. It’s that they’re weird, which leaves the explanation unsaid. He’s curious about their weirdness, not judgmental.

As Democratic pollster Zac McCrary told Politico, Harris “picked a white guy governor from the Midwest who can go into small towns in the Midwest and help her with those voters.”

Or, as anti-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes tiptoed even closer to what no one will say about those voters, “Wisconsinites look at him and say, ‘I know that guy’ … He doesn’t come off as scary.”

In other words, white voters aren’t scared by a midwestern white Lutheran who frames socialism as neighborliness. Walz has rendered right-wing labels like “handouts” miserly and mean. The language of fear.

Helping each other, as we all learned in free pre-k, is the neighborly thing to do, and the federal government is the obvious way to do it. Government is how we’re kind to each other.

And Walz isn’t out there pursuing vendettas or settling scores. Even his affect — like Harris’s — telegraphs joy, unburdened by slings and arrows.

Basically, Walz has the memory of a goldfish. Which is just one of half a dozen ways he’s like Ted Lasso.¹ Walz, too, offers a new model of what maleness can be.

Masculinity is, by definition, whatever men are doing. Which means we can choose to define masculinity as compassionate, empathetic, tender, silly, and dare I say happy.

What makes Walz a potentially revolutionary figure — and Harris revolutionary for picking him — is not just his choice to be Lasso-like, but his aspiration to make the federal government treat people the way he and Ted Lasso do.

Is Walz perfect? He is not. I railed yesterday against his hunting — and his macho-bullshit hunting rhetoric.

And Walz has fallen short of my admittedly tongue-in-cheek Lasso-esque ideals a number of times since his pick, which has been disappointing and I hope will fade away.

Yesterday, for instance, Walz took a jab at Vance, saying, “Just like all of us in regular America, we go to Yale.” First of all, Walz’s shtick isn’t us-ing and them-ing. We’re all stocked up on us and them. No more please.

As for Yale, we’re also overstocked on anti-intellectualism, thanks. Regular America definitely goes to Yale. And millions of Americans of all kinds dream of going or sending their kids.

So stick with “weird” over othering. We’re all stocked up on angry white guys.

Plus, the Ted Lasso thing is working. To wit…

The Failed Attacks

The Trump/Vance campaign has actually thrown even more at Walz than I said. Vance said Tuesday that Walz “allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis.” That’s a reference to the rioting after George Floyd’s murder, when Walz didn’t send in the National Guard at the first sign of trouble. Which, worth noting, you’re not supposed to do. Reluctance to deploy military force against the people was considered a feature, not a bug, by our founders.

And also, it turns out, by Trump.

Trump himself told Walz at the time, on tape, “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim … You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Calling Walz “an excellent guy, Trump said, “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days.”

Whoopsie.

Then there’s the stock market. When it tanked on Monday, Trump blamed Harris and Biden for that. And then shut up as soon as markets rebounded. 

Whoopsie.

And to their credit, the media noticed!

And not at all incidentally, one theory for the crash is that the Federal Reserve has waited too long to lower rates. Which Trump unsubtly warned the Fed not to do until after the election. Which, yes, actually was headline news a month ago here at TFN!

Yes, the stock market is still volatile at the moment, but even the so-called experts in the so-called science of economics are arguing with each other over why. Which is wild since you could, in theory, just ask the Wall Street bros WHY they’re selling. But that, of course, would require some modicum of bro self-awareness. Which, bros.

Anyway, Trump/Vance are also trying the classic of sliming a Democrat’s military record. Which, again, credit to the media, is already getting killed in combat.

Swift Boating 2024

Yesterday, Vance tweeted this about Walz:

“You know what really bothers me about Tim Walz?

“When the US Marine Corps asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it. 

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, he dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him. I think that's shameful.”

Vance is right. That is shameful, if “that” refers to every previous sentence. To the media’s credit, again, they’re debunking this firmly in their coverage, which, to their discredit, giving this bullshit way too much oxygen.

No rabbit holes needed for this debunking. It’s just not true. Walz filed to retire before notice came of the Iraq deployment. He filed to run for office before the possibility of deployment even emerged. And this was all in 2005. Which, as I’ve seen no one add, means that Walz stayed in the National Guard for almost four years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and two years after the U.S. invaded Iraq. He stayed in for four years during which he could have been called up. For a total of 24 years in uniform.

Vance served four years as a combat…correspondent. And I trust we all recall Trump’s military service…

But possibly the best counterattack came from the brother of not-vice-presidential candidate Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Brother Scott, a retired Navy captain and astronaut who is helping the campaign even though is brother didn’t get picked, Tweeted:

“You know what really bothers me @JDVance, is when you attack a fellow veterans military service. I respect your service and the service of @GovTimWalz and all of those honorably discharged. He was eligible for retirement after 24 years and submitted his retirement paperwork before his unit received orders (or even warning orders) to deploy and then he continued his service as a member of congress. If they needed him to stay in his unit there is a mechanism called, ‘stop-loss.’ Look it up. As a corporal with 4yrs of service, I highly doubt the USMC, ‘asked,’ you to go to Iraq.  They most likely, ‘ordered’ you to go to Iraq and had you refused, you would have been thrown in the brig. Release your military record to prove the USMC, ‘asked’ you to go. ‘Raise your hand if you want to go to Iraq.’ It’s laughable to those of us who have served. If you win, you are next in line to be Commander in Chief and need to earn the respect of all who serve, and this is not how you do it.”

Whoopsie.

And as Politico helpfully reminds us, senior Trump campaign advisor Chris LaCivita is a veteran… of the 2004 smear of then-Sen. John Kerry, elevating bullshit about Kerry’s service on a Swift Boat in the Vietnam War.

I will never stop telling people that Republican delegates wore bandages to mock Kerry’s Purple Hearts. Because they did that.

Now, Republicans do have Walz on falsely suggesting he saw combat, referring to “weapons of war, that I carried in war.” Which, yeah, no, he didn’t. Sorry, but busted.

But here’s the thing, it was one ad hoc remark, poorly phrased. Walz does not have a record of claiming he saw combat. One time, he referred falsely off the cuff to his service during a time when America was at war.

But people aren’t going to give a shit about isolated errant syllables when Vance is doing shit like…

Shit Like Stalking

Instead of doing things to make people not think of him as creepy and weird, Vance did the un version of that.

First he slated campaign stops where Harris was going. And then, in case anyone hadn’t picked up on the stalking vibe, yesterday he crossed the airport tarmac in Wisconsin to head for Harris’s plane.

Remember, this is the aggressive, hostile, menacing shit that Trump pulled on Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that no Republican has done to a non-woman. In fact, the first time it happened on a debate stage, it was the Democrat, then-Vice President Al Gore, crowding then-Gov. George W. Bush (R-TX).

Luckily for him, Vance has an ally helping him clean up his weird fixations on women…

Usha Vance Totally Fixes JD’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Quip

Remember how Vance said in 2021 that the country is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” … and how that choice that he made came back and made him miserable in the 2024 presidential election?

Well, his wife, Usha Vance, has fixed the political damage done by his quip. She addressed the quip in her first campaign interview, telling Fox — her first campaign interview — that his remark was a quip.

“The reality is, JD made a quote — I mean, he made a quip, and he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive.” 

Stand down, folks, false alarm! You can all go home, it was just a quip, see?

Her explanation about his quip instantly totally defused his political landmine, as you can see by CNN’s headline:

The only problem with Usha Vance’s defense of her husbands quip is that everyone fucking knew it was a fucking quip. 

THEY JUST DIDN’T LIKE THE FUCKING QUIP.

And when you say the quip was “in service of” a substantive point, then you’re saying people are right to think poorly of him for his quip.

In what I’m guessing was not the first time she’s cleaned up after her husband, Usha Vance went on, saying: 

“I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase…”

“What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”

Wish that people talk about those things granted! What policies could possibly have made it really hard to be a parent in this country? How about eviscerating organized labor? Is hubs ready to talk about how that’s made it really hard to be a parent in this country?

No? Well, here’s a three-word phrase: Child tax credit!

But when the Senate held a vote just last week on expanding the Child Tax Credit, Vance skipped it to campaign in Arizona. Didn’t push his party to expand it. Didn’t push Trump to push his party to expand it. Didn’t even respond when he was asked how he WOULD have voted.

That legislation alone would have lifted an estimated half a million kids out of poverty and helped at least 15 million more. I say that as a quip in service of the substantive point that expanding the Child Tax Credit would have lifted an estimated half a million kids out of poverty and helped at least 15 million more.

And y’know what might help with discussing substantive points? Not lying! Which Vance did about Harris on policies for helping parents. Lied about her position on the child tax credit. Lied when he claimed she said climate-change anxiety should make people stop having kids.

Hell, Politico did a whole-ass article headlined “How JD Vance Brought the Culture War to Helping Kids.”

Anyway, point is, everyone already knew it was a quip. They hated it because it was a shitty quip making a shitty point.

TCB

Okay, hopefully I’m all Walzed out. I’ve written so much positive shit over the past three days I’m starting to hate the guy and myself. Plus I have other stories I want to share!

So, I swear, today’s my last one. The Last Walz! That said, if you appreciated any aspect of TFN’s oversatured Walz coverage, please considering supporting TFN by becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time donation.

And come say hi on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Spoutible, Threads. I see you, Newsfuckers!

Go get ‘em, kids!

1. How many Lasso-isms did you catch in today’s TFN?