Trump team targets Walz and his military record in attempt to slow down Harris

(CNN) — It was the first big day of the wrestle for the Midwest that is likely to decide the 2024 election, and someone important was missing — former President Donald Trump.

But the Trump campaign is now on offense, with its vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance leading an attack on the military record and credibility of Vice President Kamala Harris’s new running mate Tim Walz. The focus on the Minnesota governor and claims that he sidestepped a deployment to Iraq by retiring from the Army National Guard to run for Congress in 2005 represented a searing welcome to the hard knuckle reality of a major national campaign against opponents for whom no issue is off limits.

The Republican nominee left it to Vance to troll the newly minted Democratic ticket through the critical swing state territory Wednesday as a fresh 90-day race for the White House burst into life.

Harris and Walz held two high-energy rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan that showed the euphoria inside a once-despairing Democratic Party for its two new candidates.

The Democratic nominee borrowed a trick from Trump’s playbook, performing a dramatic arrival scene aboard Air Force Two in Michigan that mirrored his past use of the bigger presidential jet before a packed airport rally. For the second day in a row, Harris appeared before thousands of excited supporters who spelled out a collective warning sign for Trump — who is known to obsess over crowd sizes. She appeared to be quickly settling into her novel role as her party’s official candidate, displaying flashes of charisma and increasing confidence as her political honeymoon showed no signs of ending.

In one moment that delighted her supporters, Harris icily stared down hecklers in Detroit who chanted what appeared to be a pro-Palestinian message. “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that, otherwise, I’m speaking,” Harris said. It was a micro episode, but the video of the put-down quickly went viral on social media in a way that enhanced the vice president’s image as she navigated one of the many challenges she’s going to face in the next three months.

The Trump team begins its counter-attack

Trump’s team, meanwhile, tipped its hand on how it plans to halt Harris’ momentum and discredit her new sidekick, whom she delights in highlighting as a coach, a veteran and an archetypal Midwestern dad.

The former president has struggled to find a way to respond to the sudden change in his opponent after President Joe Biden bowed to Democratic fears that he was too old to serve a second term. Trump’s claims that Harris is not really Black and his deliberate mangling of her name in juvenile social media posts as “Kamabla” only underscore how he seems adrift.

The Republican nominee will make a new attempt to reset the narrative of the race and to interrupt Harris’ strong start on Thursday. He said on Truth Social that he’ll hold a press conference at Mar-A-Lago at 2 p.m. ET.

Trump on Wednesday called into his safe space on Fox News from his Florida club to claim he was “thrilled” that Harris had chosen Walz, billing the Democratic team as radical and too far left for America. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” Trump said. His attacks, however, were mostly unfocused and of only limited effectiveness as he again failed to spell out a clear and concise case against his rival.

Vance was more forensic. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he held an event that was much smaller than Harris’ outdoor rally but that directly addressed key economic concerns that preoccupy voters in the region, including high prices, the cost of housing and energy and food. “I know that we can do better. We were doing better when Donald J. Trump was president,” Vance said. In a new rhetorical twist, he all but ignored Biden and kept referring to the “Harris administration,” implying the vice president was the real power in the White House.

Harris showed in the same western Wisconsin city that she understands that the economic issues that bedeviled the Biden administration, despite a strong post-Covid-19 rebound, are a huge concern. “We will continue to fight for affordable housing, for affordable health care, affordable childcare and paid leave,” she told the crowd. “While our economy is doing well, by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high. You know it and I know it.”

How Vance and Trump think they can trip up Harris

In another front of its emerging offensive against Harris, the Trump campaign cranked up pressure on the vice president to do a major media interview, apparently hoping to goad her into a forum in which she’s historically been more vulnerable than when delivering scripted speeches.

“I think it’s really disgraceful, both for Kamala Harris but also for a lot of the American media that participates in this stuff, to have a person who has been the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for 17 days and refuses to take a single question from the American media,” Vance said in Wisconsin.

In this light, Trump’s pledge to hold a news conference on Thursday looks like an attempt to create a contrast with the vice president.

Harris, especially early in her vice presidency, sometimes waffled in interviews and unscripted moments, and the Trump campaign clearly sees this as a potential way to slow her strong start. But with the Democratic National Convention looming in less than two weeks, there seems little incentive yet for the Harris camp to take any risks, especially since Democrats can argue for now at least that the vice president has been spending her time frantically building a new campaign and hurriedly seeking a running mate. But such a position will be hardly sustainable in the longer term, and Harris will come under pressure to demonstrate she’s qualified to serve as president – especially amid increasing challenges to American power abroad.

The way that Vance is pursuing the vice president through the nation’s most contested political real estate was illustrated in one rather odd moment on Wednesday. As he arrived in Wisconsin and saw Air Force Two on the tarmac, he walked toward the plane in what he later said was an attempt to talk to the vice president. “I just wanted to check out my future plane,” he said.

A Trump shift on a second debate?

There was another sign on Wednesday of the shifting political sands underneath the campaign. Days after saying he’d refuse to take part in a previously arranged presidential debate on ABC and demanding that Harris meet him on Fox, the ex-president showed new openness to a one-on-one clash.

“We’ll be debating her, I guess, in the pretty near future. It’s going to be announced fairly soon, but we’ll be debating her,” he said in his Fox interview, leaving open the possibility it could happen on a different network.

“I’d do it right now, because I want to debate her. I think it’s important for the country that we debate,” he said. After trying to dictate terms for a showdown on the conservative news channel, Trump then added, “I think Fox would do a really good job, but two people have to agree.”

The fight for rural voters

Harris seems to see Walz as a priceless asset in courting voters outside traditional Democratic areas.

“Isn’t he amazing?” Harris asked another fired up crowd in Detroit on Wednesday night.

Her campaign, meanwhile, released a memo from its battleground states director, Dan Kanninen, that foretold the coming fight over swing states. “We … are competing everywhere because we know we need to narrow the margins in rural areas to win,” the memo said. Kanninen argued that Walz was ideally positioned to lead the quest for these voters, pointing out that he had “represented a Republican district in southern Minnesota for 6 terms in Congress” and had historically outperformed national Democrats in his House district, including in areas that supported Trump. This, the memo said, offered a “blueprint for how to cut margins in rural areas across the country.”

But the Trump campaign is trying to make Walz a liability for the vice president. It spent all day seeking to make him out to be a political extremist antithetical to the American middle ground on crime, immigration and social policies.

Trump’s allies, for example, are calling attention to a new Minnesota law requiring public schools to stock menstrual products in both their girls and boys bathrooms in an effort to paint Walz as a far-left liberal for accommodating transgender students. And Republicans have been focused on his handling of the unrest in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd, accusing him of waiting too long to call in the state National Guard. Trump, however, praised Walz’s response in a 2020 call with governors, undercutting some of those lines of attack.

A spat over military service

And Vance stepped up his attacks on Walz’s portrayal of his military career, accusing him of ducking service in Iraq when he left the Army National Guard and ran for Congress in 2005.

“When the United State Marine Corps, when the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it. I did what they asked me to do, and I did it honorably and I’m very proud of that service. When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him,” Vance said.

Walz filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission as a candidate for Congress on February 10, 2005. The next month, after the guard announced a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, Walz’s campaign issued a statement saying he intended to stay in the race.

Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, retiring in May 2005, according to the Minnesota National Guard. Service members often submit their paperwork for retirement months before their retirement date. It’s unclear when Walz submitted his papers for retirement. A National Guard article on his unit’s deployment states that it received alert orders to deploy to Iraq in July 2005 – two months after Walz retired.

Vance served four years in the Marine Corps as an enlisted combat correspondent, in public affairs, and deployed once to Iraq for roughly six months, according to his military record. He left service in September 2007 as a corporal.

The Ohio Republican also accused Walz of falsely claiming he had served in a combat zone, pointing to the governor’s comments about supporting an assault weapons ban. “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at,” the governor said in a video promoted by the Harris campaign. Walz deployed with the Minnesota National Guard in August 2003 to Vicenza, Italy, as part of support for the US war in Afghanistan, according to a Minnesota Guard spokesperson. He did not deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq or a combat zone as part of his service.

Biden’s warning

The spectacle of one military veteran sparring over the service of another was a sign of the bitter political struggle to come in an election that holds huge implications for the country.

To that point, Biden issued a fresh warning about Trump’s potential threats to democracy, in an intervention into a campaign in which he was once a central figure but is now marginalized.

The president, in his first interview since ending his reelection bid, told CBS News that he doesn’t have confidence that there’ll be a peaceful transition of power if Trump loses in November.

“I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says,” Biden said.

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