Tim Walz at Fort Benning in 1981.
Photo: Courtesy of the United States Army

To undermine the overwhelmingly positive sentiment among Democrats surrounding the nomination of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Team Trump is trying to paint the good-humored Minnesota governor as a grim leftist whom progressives pushed into the vice presidential nomination at the expense of moderates like Josh Shapiro (who, of course, would have been portrayed by Republicans as a communist had he been elected). But it’s hard to paint the former football coach, avid hunter and teacher from a decidedly rural background as a devout follower of Karl Marx. So Republicans are resorting to an old tactic that Trump co-chair Chris LaCivita knows well from his deep involvement in “swiftboating” John Kerry in 2004: they’re drawing on Walz’s military record, one of his strongest arguments in refuting the notion that he’s some kind of anti-American zealot.

LaCivita is at the center of the attack on Walz, which is not surprising, as Politico Playbook reports:

“The two biggest sins in the military are claiming awards you don’t have or claiming combat you didn’t participate in… And this much is certain: He is guilty of at least one of those sins,” LaCivita told our colleagues Jared Mitovich, Meridith McGraw and Connor O’Brien yesterday. “None of his lies were used as a political weapon. That will soon change.”

The killer in this attack was, fittingly, Walz’s counterpart, JD Vance, who, like Walz, enlisted straight out of high school (Vance in the Marines, Walz in the Army National Guard). As the New York Just Vance reportedly reacted very sharply to the allegations LaCivita alluded to:

Speaking at the police station in Shelby Township, Michigan, on Wednesday morning, Vance said Walz had effectively abandoned his comrades to avoid deployment to Iraq. He retired from the National Guard in May 2005, several months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy there…

Vance also echoed a comment by Walz in a video clip that the Harris campaign shared on social media on Tuesday. In it, the governor spoke to a crowd of supporters of gun control and said, “We can make sure that the weapons of war that I carried in war are only carried in war.”

However, Mr. Walz never saw combat action, leading Mr. Vance to accuse him of “stolen valor.”

“I would be ashamed if I were him and how he would lie about my military service,” Mr. Vance said.

Will this approach be as successful as it was (to some extent) against John Kerry? Probably not.

First of all, the facts underlying LaCivita and Vance’s line of attack don’t seem to justify all the anger. No one disputes that Walz served honorably in the National Guard for 24 years. The first, and perhaps most serious, allegation is that Walz retired after those 24 years (which he was perfectly able to do) to avoid deployment to Iraq. Two former National Guard colleagues, apparently angry at Walz’s opposition to the Iraq War, first made this allegation as part of an earlier political attack on Walz when he ran for governor in 2018. Other colleagues, however, documented that Walz had been talking for quite some time about retiring to run for Congress (which he did) and that he couldn’t have known about the subsequent deployment after he left. There really is no better proof of Walz’s alleged cowardice than the claim of two guys who clearly didn’t like his politics.

The second allegation, which Vance euphemistically termed “stolen heroism,” actually refers to a single ambiguous reference by Walz to carrying a weapon “in war,” although others have pointed to a claim in a 2006 press release by Walz that he participated in Operation Enduring Freedom (the official name of the Afghanistan mission). Whatever readers of that press release thought, the claim is actually true, since Walz and his unit were deployed to Europe in support roles for that war.

Although Vance did not mention it, his conservative allies have also accused Walz of inflating his rank in describing his service. This line of attack is probably the most tenuous: Everyone acknowledges that Walz reached the rank of command sergeant major in the Guard, the highest rank a soldier can attain. But he failed to complete some courses required to retire at that rank. So are some references on campaign websites that refer to Walz as a “retired Command Sergeant Major” some kind of “lie”? I don’t think so; he was retired and actually attained that rank.

All in all, the attacks on Walz’s military record seem pretty weak. Even the most serious one – the allegation that he avoided deployment to Iraq – has to come with an asterisk: JD Vance’s running mate Donald Trump has repeatedly called that war a catastrophic mistake. When he retired from the National Guard, Walz shared that view. Should he have stayed to see if he could be deployed there?

But facts aside, there are two broad reasons why trying to outsmart Tim Walz won’t work. First, we are in a different era of American war experience. 2.9 million During the Vietnam War, young men were drafted into the military; John Kerry’s military service there resonated with many voters. In the post-conscription era, people like Walz and Vance (a press secretary deployed to Iraq) who voluntarily chose to serve in the uniform are the exception rather than the rule. More typical is Donald Trump, who was ahead of his time in finding a way to avoid military service (some say he achieved it through his father’s influence).

And the second reason this won’t be a repeat of 2004 is that the Kerry campaign largely ignored Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s attacks on his war record after paving the way for them to win by overemphasizing that record at the Democratic National Convention (the candidate famously began his acceptance speech with a salute and the words, “I’m John Kerry, reporting for duty”). Walz has not made his National Guard service his primary qualification for running for vice president. And the Harris-Walz campaign is certainly not going to sit quietly and take the slander.