Tim Walz has made his debut as Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Republicans are struggling to apply their standard villainization playbook to the Minnesota governor.
Walz has been making waves for weeks now as a good-natured, relatable politician with a particular aptitude for dressing down the Republican agenda in terms that any voter can understand — and the GOP hates it.
Republicans are scrambling to paint the governor-turned-VP candidate as a devilish Marxist hellbent on running the country into the ground — their usual stuff — while leveling a bunch of other really weird attacks. Here are some of their most pathetic attempts to turn voters against Walz.
Tampon Tim
As they tend to do when they meet someone they don’t like, Republicans quickly centered their attacks on Walz around their own obsession with children’s reproductive organs.
In 2023, Walz signed into law legislation that provided free access to menstrual products “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12.” The benefit extended to transgender students who used the boy’s bathroom — and some Minnesota Republicans even voted for it.
No one should be required to explain their need for a tampon, but for some right-wing agitators, the legislation was an in to attack Walz.
Others were quick to point out that not only was the bill inclusive to LGBTQ+ students, but access to free sanitary products is also a boon to low-income students and their families, having them in all restrooms ensures they are available if the women’s restroom is out of service, and — as explained by Amanda Bynes in She’s The Man — they’re great for nosebleeds.
He’ll allow convicted felons to vote
In a statement responding to Walz’s selection as Harris’s running mate, the Trump campaign attacked the governor for “embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote,” seemingly forgetting that the former president is a convicted felon whose ability to vote is no longer guaranteed in every state.
He’s turning Minnesota into Somalia
It wouldn’t be a Republican smear campaign without a heavy dose of racism. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali-American population in the United States, with more than 86,000 Somali-Americans residing in the state amidst their total population of almost 6 million people.
Republicans falsely accused Walz of changing Minnesota’s state flag to more closely resemble that of Somalia. In 2023, the legislature moved to redesign the flag amid concerns from local indigenous populations that the old flag contained offensive stereotypes about their communities. The redesign was conducted through a public survey and highlights the architecture of the state Capitol, the shape of the state, and its fame as the “Land of 10,000
Lakes.”
The idea that Walz changed the flag to match that of Somalia was also repeatedly highlighted on Fox News.
Trump’s former adviser and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller claimed on Fox that Harris and Walsh want to turn “the entire Midwest into Mogadishu” — the capital of Somalia — and attacked the presence of refugees in the U.S.
It’s no shock that Republicans would zero in on a proportionally small migrant community to malign Walz, that doesn’t make it any less gross.
He has a normal family?
A wife and two kids? Unthinkable.
He was chosen because Democrats are antisemitic
The race for the Democratic vice-presidential slot came down to two main contenders: Walz and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish.
According to CNN, Walz was ultimately chosen for a variety of factors, including his natural rapport with Harris. NBC News reported on comments from one Democratic strategist who said that “polling showed Shapiro wouldn’t help that much more than the others,” in terms of winning Pennsylvania. Concerns were raised about his response to pro-Palestinian protests in the state, as well as his public sparring with teachers unions, his handling of sexual harassment claims against his aide, and ongoing questions over an unsolved alleged murder he oversaw as attorney general.
But despite the many factors that influence a VP pick, Republicans were quick to accuse the Harris campaign of antisemitism.
“No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party,” conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X, to which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is Jewish, sarcastically responded: “News to me.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed that Shapiro’s Jewish faith was “clearly was a major factor” in the decision and that Harris “was reluctant to put a vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Jewish heritage because they’re having a split in the Democratic Party.”
Shapiro himself dismissed the notion, throwing his full support behind Harris at a Tuesday night rally in Philadelphia. “My faith teaches me that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it. That means that each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game, and to do our part,” he said.
He’s just like America’s most beloved comedians
In what apparently was an attempt at an insult, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro attempted to take a dig at Walz by comparing him to another famed Midwesterner: Saturday Night Live legend Chris Farley.
“Meet Tim Walz, who lives in a van down by the river,” Shapiro wrote on X alongside a photo of Walz, referencing one of Farley’s most famous sketches.
The joke didn’t land, with users pointing out that people love Farley, who continues to be one of the most famous American comedians to ever bless the nation with his craft. Shapiro later doubled down in another post, comparing Walz to famed performer Don Rickles.
Funny? Beloved? Fame beyond their generation? You sure got him Ben.
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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.