Why the Swiftboating of Tim Walz Won’t Work

In an effort to undermine the highly positive vibe among Democrats surrounding Tim Walz’s unveiling as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Team Trump is trying to depict the jovial Minnesota governor as a grim leftist whom progressives pushed into the veep nomination at the expense of moderates like Josh Shapiro (who would have been, of course, depicted by Republicans as a communist had he been chosen). But the former football coach, avid hunter and school teacher from a distinctly rural background is hard to typecast as a faithful disciple of Karl Marx. So the GOP is deploying an old playbook item that Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita knows well from his deep involvement in the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry in 2004: an attack on Walz’s military record, one of his strongest credentials in rebutting the idea he is some sort of anti-American zealot.

LaCivita is front and center in the attack on Walz, unsurprisingly, as Politico Playbook reports:

“The two biggest sins in the military are claiming credit for decorations you don’t have or claiming combat action that you did not participate in … And this much is certain: He’s guilty of at least one of them,” LaCivita told our colleagues Jared Mitovich, Meridith McGraw and Connor O’Brien yesterday. “Nothing regarding his lies has been weaponized in a political sense. That’s about to change.”

The hit man in this attack was, appropriately enough, Walz’s counterpart, J.D. Vance, who much like Walz enlisted right after high school (Vance in the Marines, Walz in the Army National Guard). As the New York Times reports, Vance came in very hot on the accusations to which LaCivita alluded:

Speaking at the police department in Shelby Township, Mich., on Wednesday morning, Mr. Vance said Mr. Walz had effectively deserted his fellow soldiers to avoid serving in Iraq because he retired from the National Guard in May 2005, several months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy there …

Mr. Vance also seized on a remark by Mr. Walz in a video clip that the Harris campaign had promoted on social media on Tuesday, in which the governor told a crowd about support for gun control, saying that “we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”

Mr. Walz never served in combat, however, which prompted Mr. Vance to accuse him of “stolen valor.”

“I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did,” Mr. Vance said.

Will this effort work as it did (to some extent) against John Kerry? Probably not.

First of all, the facts underlying the LaCivita-Vance line of attack don’t appear to justify all the angry passion. No one is disputing that Walz served honorably in the Guard for 24 years. The first charge, and perhaps the most serious, is that Walz retired at the end of those 24 years (as he was fully eligible to do) in order to avoid deployment to Iraq. Two former Guard colleagues, apparently infuriated by Walz’s opposition to the Iraq War, first raised this charge as part of an earlier political attack on Walz when he ran for governor in 2018. But other colleagues documented that Walz had been talking for quite some time about retiring in order to run for Congress (which is precisely what he did) and that he had no way of knowing about the subsequent deployment when he retired. There’s really no more evidence of Walz’s alleged cowardice than an assertion by two dudes who clearly didn’t like his politics.

The second charge, which Vance dressed up with the lurid term of “stolen valor,” really just refers to a single ambiguous reference Walz made to carrying a gun “in war,” though others have pointed to a claim in a 2006 Walz press release that he served in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the official name of the Afghanistan deployment). Whatever viewers of that press release thought, the claim is actually true since Walz and his unit were deployed to Europe in a support capacity for that war.

Though Vance didn’t mention it, his conservative allies have also charged that Walz inflated his rank in descriptions of his service. This attack line is probably the flimsiest: Everyone concedes Walz achieved the rank of command sergeant major in the Guard, the highest rank attainable by an enlisted service member. But he didn’t complete some coursework required to retire at that rank. So are a few references on campaign websites to Walz as a “retired command sergeant major” some sort of “lie?” I don’t think so; he was retired, and he did achieve that rank.

All in all, the attacks on Walz’s military record come across as pretty weak tea. Even the most serious — the claim that he dodged serving in Iraq — requires an asterisk: J.D. Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump, has endlessly described that war as a disastrous mistake. By the time he retired from the Guard, Walz shared that view. Should he have stuck around to see if he could be deployed there?

But, facts aside, there are two big-picture reasons the attempted Swiftboating of Tim Walz won’t work. First, we’re in a different era of American experiences with war. 2.9 million young men were drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War; John Kerry’s service there resonated with a lot of voters. In the post-conscription era, people like Walz and Vance (a public-affairs officer deployed to Iraq) who chose to put on 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 (via his father’s influence, some claim).

And the second reason this won’t be a replay of 2004 is that the Kerry campaign largely ignored the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacks on his war record, after setting them up for success by overemphasizing that record at the Democratic National Convention (the candidate famously began his acceptance speech by saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty”). Walz hasn’t made his Guard service his principal credential for election as vice-president. And the Harris-Walz campaign sure as hell isn’t falling silent and letting the smears stand.