Tim Walz: the Democrats’ Walter Mitty

Last night’s US vice-presidential debate between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz had none of the explosiveness of the presidential match-ups. In fact, the exchange was polite enough to almost make you forget about all the chunks the pair have torn out of each other over the past weeks and months. Most notoriously, back in July, Walz branded Vance, Donald Trump and the ‘MAGA’ cohort of Republicans ‘weird’. But in the CBS debate, it was Walz who came across as the more suspect of the two.

Aside from his gaffes (at one point, he declared that he had ‘become friends with school shooters’), Walz was exposed as something of a Walter Mitty character. He was asked by the moderators to explain a discrepancy in a story he likes to tell about apparently being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests. This is a claim he has been making for years now, most recently in 2019. Supposedly, he was working as a teacher in Hong Kong when the student demonstrations erupted in Beijing in 1989. But it was recently unearthed that Walz didn’t actually arrive until August 1989. (The protests were brutally put down in early June of that year.)

When asked about this during the debate, Walz danced around the question, initially launching into an unrelated spiel about his Midwestern roots. ‘I grew up in a small rural Nebraska town’, he began. ‘I have poured out my heart in my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I have not been perfect and I have been a knucklehead at times.’ Apparently, a folksy Midwesterner like Walz can’t be expected to tell the truth consistently.

Eventually, Walz admitted that he ‘misspoke’. ‘Many times I will talk a lot, I will get caught up in the rhetoric’, he said. He isn’t kidding. Indeed, Walz has a long history of getting ‘caught up in the rhetoric’ and playing fast and loose with the facts of his own life.

Even before Kamala Harris named him as her vice-presidential nominee, Walz has made much of being a champion for reproductive rights, particularly for fertility treatments like in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Fair enough. Not least as there are some pro-life Republicans who want to ban IVF, because it involves the destruction of unused embryos. The problem is that Walz has constantly tried to insert himself into the debate, by dint of another questionable personal story.

In March this year, his fundraising team sent out an email talking about him and his wife’s ‘IVF journey’. This, the team said, was what allowed them to have their two children. Earlier this month, Walz even called Vance out personally for being a proponent for banning IVF, saying that ‘if it was up to [Vance], I wouldn’t have a family’.

This would all be compelling, emotionally powerful stuff, if only there were some truth behind it. In reality, Walz and his wife never used IVF to conceive. Instead, they used an entirely different treatment called intrauterine insemination (IUI) – a procedure that is usually attempted before IVF because it is less invasive. Crucially, it doesn’t involve discarding embryos. Even the most hardline ‘pro life’ regime, in other words, would not have prevented him from having a family.

Walz is also keen to play up his service in the National Guard – so keen, it seems, that he has been accused of dabbling in stolen valour. In 2006, he claimed to be a ‘retired command sergeant major’. He did briefly receive that rank during his 24 years of service, but he did not retire as a command sergeant major. This distinction might sound minor to civilians, but Walz’s conflation of the two has caused deep offence to many servicemen.

Not satisfied with overstating his rank, Walz has also falsely insinuated that he saw combat. In a video posted to social media in 2018 about school shootings, he made reference to ‘weapons of war that I carried in war’ – despite the fact that he never stepped foot in an active warzone. He retired from the military in 2005, shortly before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz later said – once again – that he had ‘misspoke’.

Incredibly, Walz’s campaign team has attempted to use his National Guard record to explain away an arrest for drunk driving. In 1995, he was caught doing 96mph in a 55mph zone and then failed a breathalyser test. In 2006, while Walz was running for congress, campaign staffers insisted that he wasn’t actually drunk – he just couldn’t hear what the officer who pulled him over was saying, as a result of the hearing loss he sustained serving with an artillery unit. Apparently, this had also left him with balance issues that meant he failed the sobriety tests. The fact that his blood-alcohol level was also over the limit must have been a very unfortunate coincidence.

The gaslighting didn’t stop there. Walz’s campaign team claimed that, after the arrest, police allowed him to drive himself home and that the judge chastised the officer who arrested him for not realising he was deaf. The court transcript tells a very different story – namely, that Walz was booked into jail and admitted to being over the limit. It makes no mention of hearing issues.

It seems that Tim Walz just can’t help himself. He seems to embellish his stories, or invent convenient facts, whenever it suits him. He is easily as economical with the truth as the less-than-reliable Donald Trump. But don’t expect Walz to be ‘fact-checked’ anywhere near as vociferously, as this election campaign wears on.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.