The Trump campaign’s attacks on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s military record are channeling the “swift boating” campaign 20 years ago against John Kerry, which accused the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee of lying about his Vietnam service and decorations.
The common denominator in both efforts: Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.
LaCivita played a key role in the political advocacy group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which ran the TV ad campaign questioning Kerry’s military service. It’s a playbook that the Trump campaign appears to be re-running after Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Walz, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard, as her running mate.
Neither Harris nor Donald Trump ever served in the military. But Trump’s running mate – Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who is a Marine veteran – quickly zeroed-in on Walz’s military service, accusing him this week of abandoning his unit before it deployed to Iraq in 2006 and of falsely claiming he served in a war zone.
“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 at a campaign stop Wednesday.
Walz filed to run for Congress in February 2005 – before his unit was notified it could deploy to Iraq. He 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, but not to a war zone.
The hits on Walz’s military service align with Trump’s penchant for personal attacks against his political opponents, while also harkening back to the effort to sully Kerry’s military record two decades ago.
LaCivita even connected the two in an interview with…
Read the full article here
