Good morning! Audrey Fahlberg here, National Review’s political reporter, here filling in for Jim Geraghty.
On the menu today: The attacks on Tim Walz’s time in the military are continuing apace.
Trump Team Goes Scorched Earth on Tim Walz’s Military Record: ‘Unforgivable Sin’
On Tuesday evening, the Kamala Harris campaign was riding high. Two weeks after emerging as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris was rallying onstage for the first time with the man she’d tapped as her running mate — Midwestern governor Tim Walz, a small-town Nebraska native, former football coach, social-studies teacher, purple-seat representative, and 24-year military veteran.
Then came the drip, drip, drip of Republican attacks on Walz’s military record. In recent days, Ohio senator J. D. Vance has led the GOP ticket’s military-related attacks on Walz, hitting him for not deploying to Iraq with his unit in 2005 and arguing that he has misrepresented his retired rank and service on multiple occasions.
“What bothers me about Tim Walz is this stolen-valor garbage,” Vance, who served four years of active duty in the Marine Corps, said at a campaign stop earlier this week. “Do not pretend to be something that you’re not.”
The GOP ticket has also hit Walz for a video posted on X this week by the Harris campaign showing Walz telling a crowd: “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” Vance asked at a recent campaign stop: “What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq?”
Walz enlisted in the Nebraska Army National Guard at age 17. As National Review’s Thursday editorial noted, he reenlisted multiple times throughout his career, including after 9/11, the same year he was eligible for a retirement pension after two decades of service. He deployed to Italy in 2003 and upon returning in 2004 was promoted to serve as his battalion’s command sergeant major. In March 2005, Walz wrote in a press release: “As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq.”
He then retired in May 2005 to run for Congress, months before his unit was deployed to Iraq, drawing ire from some of his fellow national guardsmen who first made their criticisms public in 2018. Other national guardsmen have publicly praised his service over the years. “He was as good a soldier as you’d find, and to have two former sergeant majors say that he wasn’t, it’s just not true,” Joseph Eustice, who led the same battalion, told the New York Times this week.
The GOP ticket’s campaign mudslinging is likely to escalate through Election Day. Just ask Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, a Purple Heart recipient and the brains behind the “Swift Boat” attacks on John Kerry in 2004. Like other Republicans this week, he’s taken aim at Walz for being photographed in 2004 carrying a poster that read “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry” and not correcting the record when journalists have incorrectly characterized his service over the years.
“Combat is a horrific experience,” LaCivita said in an interview with National Review. “To try to put yourself in a position to state that, ‘Well, I went to combat,’ and then to do it in the context of politics — it’s just an unforgivable sin. It speaks to character.”
Then, he twisted the knife: “The guy spent 24 years in the military, he was a leader of men, and he decided that he wasn’t going to go,” LaCivita said of Walz’s decision to retire before his troops deployed. “I mean, he chickened out. When you chicken — out, literally — you leave your men high and dry.”
This is an incredibly sensitive charge that also carries serious political risks. (There’s a reason that Vance and LaCivita, both military veterans, are prosecuting this case against Walz and not Donald Trump.) Yet the GOP ticket has made the calculation that it is a risk worth taking.
“Charges of Stolen Valor have been taken extremely seriously, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat, the veteran community and the military community take these things extraordinarily seriously,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley told National Review. “And you’re not just going to be able to ignore this and have it go away, no matter who you are, if this is something that comes up.”
Politically speaking, the point of the hits on Walz’s military record is to get as many voters to Google “Tim Walz Stolen Valor” as possible. Added another Republican strategist close to Trump: “The fact that CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post and the New York Times are being forced to cover it at all shows how much of an issue this is” for the Harris–Walz campaign.
Democrats insist they aren’t worried about the attacks. “He was in the military for 24 years. That’s all that people need to hear and know,” former Alabama senator Doug Jones told NR in an interview.
And yet cleanup from the Harris–Walz camp has been odd. The Harris campaign had to correct the record multiple times this week, changing its website’s identification of Walz as “retired command sergeant major” to clarify that he once served at that rank and retired as master sergeant. And while Harris correctly stated earlier this week that her new running mate served as the “the top Democrat on the Veterans Committee” in the House, her campaign had to correct the record after incorrectly stating that “he chaired Veterans Affairs.” As RealClearPolitics reported, the Harris campaign called it an “innocent mistake.”
This entire thread from Iraq veteran and former representative Peter Meijer (R., Mich.) is well worth your time:
Gonna piss off everyone with this take, but what the hell:
I think Walz played fast & loose with his military bio to stay above water as his congressional district drifted right. He let audiences paint in their minds a deceptive picture. It was shady but not stolen valor. (1/5)
— Peter Meijer (@RepMeijer) August 8, 2024
ADDENDUM: Former speaker Nancy Pelosi took the gloves off when discussing Joe Biden’s political team and decision to drop out of the presidential race last month in an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick:
“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen.
This post has been updated.