It’s been less than a day since Vice President Kamala Harris officially rolled out progressive darling Tim Walz as her 2024 running mate, and he already has a specific mandate from his boss: drive Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the right as crazy as he possibly can.
According to multiple Democratic sources on and close to the Harris 2024 campaign, the vice president and her allies are planning to deploy Walz over the next three months in the media and on the campaign trail as an omnipresent, MAGA-trashing attack dog. Walz is set to be, in the phrasing of one Harris 2024 source, the campaign’s go-to “sledgehammer against Vance and Trump” from now until Election Day.
That role was on full display at the first Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia Tuesday. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” Walz said of Trump and his VP nominee, Vance. He called them out for wanting to “invade your doctor’s office.” Walz even referenced the unfounded, viral claim that J.D. Vance had sex with a couch. “I can’t wait to debate the guy,” he said, waiting until the audience quieted down to drop the hammer. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Harris and her senior staff, sources say, were impressed by Walz’s style of unapologetically progressive and anti-Trump messaging, as well as his ability to tilt entire news cycles at this relatively late stage in the president election. It was Walz who helped drive the message that Trump and Vance are “weird” — an attack that quickly became a large-scale Democratic Party talking point against Team Trump and the GOP.
The “weird” message, Rolling Stone recently reported, has gotten under Trump’s skin. “Nobody’s ever called me weird,” the former president protested last week. Speaking with aides and other advisers privately, Trump has gotten particularly incensed about how those attacks have been directed at Vance.
“We are running against a weird dangerous agenda of taking away people’s rights, monitoring women’s pregnancies, and other insane hurtful bullshit like making Trump a dictator,” says a source familiar with Harrisworld’s thinking on Walz. “The antidote to that is a regular guy in Tim Walz — a veteran, football coach, friendly neighbor who helps fix your car, and a really successful governor. It’s why his attacks have been so potent the last month and why he won in a swing district for years against GOP attacks. His shit isn’t poll-tested, it’s gut-checked.”
After Walz’s announcement as the Democratic VP nominee on Monday, Trump and his allies spent the day testing out several messages. They tried depicting Walz as a dangerous, San Francisco-loving, radical liberal with no charisma, despite his rather obvious gift of gab and extremely Midwestern vibe. Conservative media outlets launched several attacks on Walz’s military record, faulting him for retiring from the Minnesota National Guard after two decades of service to run for Congress. Walz, meanwhile, said Tuesday that Trump “doesn’t know the first thing about service — because he’s too busy serving himself.”
Walz has been a progressive governor, particularly in his second term. After the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party secured a governing trifecta, capturing both legislative chambers for the first time in years, he and lawmakers rammed through universal free school meals, child tax credits, strong protections for abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights, paid leave, infrastructure investments, and universal gun background checks.
He’s not running away from his record on social issues. “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make — even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves,” Walz said Tuesday. “There’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business.”
And Walz is proud of the way he and his party enacted their agenda. Last summer, he posted that “Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital — you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”
Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, there has been a remarkable sea change in strategy, as the party has shown a new willingness to play rougher and get down in the mud with Trump. While Harris was reportedly enthused about Walz’s record of accomplishments as governor, his selection is a sign that Democrats intend to keep up the attacks on the GOP.
Democrats have seized on Walz’s “weird” attack line against Republicans since the moment he trotted it out. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said on MSNBC on July 24. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. And don’t, you know, get sugarcoating this. These are weird ideas.”
Walz’s message has pleased liberal TV viewers, frustrated Trump, and made an impression with Americans more broadly, according to a new poll from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Respondents were to give one-word descriptions of Vance — without any priming — and the UMass Poll created a word cloud with the results. The two largest words: “unknown” and “weird.
Harris’ selection of Walz earned plaudits from certain Democrats and centrists who have often been highly critical of the party’s more progressive flank and cultural liberalism. Even Joe Manchin — Joe Manchin! — is on board with the Walz pick. He wrote Tuesday that Walz will “bring normalcy back to Washington.”
James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist who was a central figure in engineering Bill Clinton’s presidential victory, offered praise for Harris’ VP selection, too.
“I have been saying the Democrats have their scariest problems with male voters,” Carville tells Rolling Stone. “But this guy is a veteran, he’s a hunter, a football coach, a fisherman — he is definitely a male. Everything about [Tim Walz] screams male.”
Carville had been harshly critical of Democrats for not pushing Biden to drop his reelection bid sooner, and had recently warned liberals to temper their “triumphalism” over Harris’ rise.
“The NPR crowd, they’ll never get it. But 48 percent of the people who come out and vote are male, and that’s not an insignificant percentage of voters,” Carville adds. “Now, it remains to be seen if it was the right selection, but the early signs are encouraging.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.