Democrats push back as Trumpworld dusts off ‘swift boat’ attack on Walz

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Two decades after false allegations of stolen valor against his opponent helped George W Bush win a second term in the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign isn’t letting the same thing happen to her or her running-mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

The Harris campaign is defending Walz, an Army veteran who spent nearly a quarter-century in the Minnesota National Guard, from Republicans who are claiming he deserted to avoid deployment to Iraq and falsely accusing him of claiming to be a combat veteran.

His GOP opponent, Trump running-mate and Ohio senator JD Vance, made the disturbing allegations during a media availability in Wisconsin ahead of a massive Harris-Walz rally in the Badger State. He told reporters that Walz, who retired from the Minnesota guard after 24 years of service to run for Congress in the 2006 election, had “dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go [to Iraq] without him.”

Vance also accused Walz of falsely claiming to have seen combat, citing comments the Minnesotan had made about not wanting “weapons of war” to be available on American streets.

The Ohio senator’s accusation that his opponent ditched his guard unit rather than deploy to combat is patently false.

According to military records, Walz officially retired from the Minnesota National Guard in May 2005, two months before his unit received word that it would be deployed, four months before deployment preparations began and ten months before the unit deployed.

In a statement, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson strongly pushed back against Vance’s claim that Walz had “dropped out” rather than deploy with the men he led, instead accurately describing the governor’s separation from service as a normal retirement after nearly a quarter-century in uniform.

“After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he chaired Veterans Affairs and was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform - and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families,” they said.

According to Army records, Walz’s nearly two and a half decades in the Minnesota Guard began at age 17 and ended with him holding the rank of Command Sergeant Major, the highest possible rank for an enlisted soldier.

Like most National Guard soldiers, he was frequently deployed in response to national disasters, but he also was sent overseas to Italy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, the US mission to Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The campaign spokesperson also pushed back on Vance’s claim that Walz had falsely claimed to have carried arms against the enemy by noting that he never claimed to have seen combat.

“The Governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times,” they said, including by specializing in heavy artillery to the point of suffering hearing damage as a result of exposure to decades of heavy gun blasts. They added that Walz “would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country” and said he thanks Vance for having “put his life on the line” by deploying to Iraq as a public affairs specialist with the US Marine Corps.

The attacks against the governor appear to be the brainchild of Chris LaCivita, one of the two GOP operatives who run former president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Twenty years ago, he was one of the consultants who orchestrated a smear campaign against John Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator and the Democratic challenger who sought to deny Bush a second term in the White House.

The campaign was the work of a GOP group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” ostensibly made up of Vietnam veterans who served with Kerry, a US Navy veteran who earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star while commanding small riverine craft in the Vietnamese jungles. 

It was 2004, just three years removed from the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and Kerry was running against Bush — and in opposition to the US-led war in Iraq — by invoking his military service. Opinion polls at the time showed that Americans saw Kerry’s record as a positive and put him ahead of Bush after the party nominating conventions that year.

The “Swift Boat Veterans” group responded by airing television ads in which purported veterans who claimed to have served with Kerry criticized him and accused him of being dishonest about his service record.

It wasn’t true. Only one of the people in the ad had actually served alongside Kerry, and the claims they made about Kerry’s alleged dishonesty didn’t hold up to independent fact-checking. But the damage was done, and Kerry would go on to lose the 2004 election to Bush.

Two decades later, with Trump foundering in the polls against Harris and Walz, LaCivita began telegraphing his intention to dust off his “Swift Boat” playbook just minutes after Walz was announced as Harris’s running-mate.

In response to a post on X (formerly Twitter) noting that Walz — a former Command Sergeant Major in the Minnesota guard — was the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to ever serve in the US Congress during his decade in the House of Representatives, LaCivita wrote that the would-be vice president “deserted his men and quit before they went to combat.”

A person close to the Harris-Walz campaign told The Independent that the vice president and a host of surrogates plan to push back hard against any attempt to “swift boat” the Minnesota governor and said LaCivita’s playbook “will not work this time.”

“It’s a tired, old strategy and the American people are too smart to fall for that, especially from anyone allied with a draft dodger like Donald Trump,” they said.

Rick Wilson, a former GOP operative who founded and runs the anti-Trump Lincoln Project super PAC, told The Independent that LaCivita’s decision to go after Walz’s military record is a sign that he’s increasingly desperate and trying to keep from being fired by Trump as the ex-president loses ground to Harris and Walz.

“Chris is worried about getting fired right now, so obviously he’s going to do everything and can to play the LaCivita greatest hits album. If Donald Trump wasn’t bunkered down in Mar-a-Lago hiding like a f*****g psychopath, it might be more effective,” Wilson said.

He added that the attacks against Walz have “a fat Elvis imitator vibe” from “some guy playing in a casino/gas station 27 miles out of Elko, Nevada.”

“Chris and Susie are in real trouble in Trump world, and it’s not getting any better,” he said.

LaCivita did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.