Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a campaign rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday. (Drew Angerer – AFP / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders October 29, 2024 at 7:49am
Stories from Tim Walz’s past keep coming back to bite him.
The Minnesota governor-turned-Democratic-presidential-nominee has already seen his statements about his military service debunked and his “misstatements” about details of his Chinese travels exposed.
Now, a woman’s tale of a youthful love affair is making Walz look even worse. And Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t come off much better.
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the daughter of a now-deceased Chinese Communist Party leader is claiming that Walz dallied with her during his time as a teacher in China in 1989-90.
Walz led her to believe that marriage was in the offing, the woman claimed, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, she said, Walz accused her of being interested in marrying an American only to get to the U.S.
Jenna Wang, now 59, told the Daily Mail she was an English-language teacher at a middle school near the school where Walz began teaching in the Chinese city of Foshan, in the southern coastal province of Guangdong.
The two began to date secretly — Wang’s father would not have approved of her seeing a Westerner, according to the Daily Mail.
Walz, who could travel easily to Macau and Hong Kong — Portugese and British territories at the time — would bring Wang back presents unavailable to most Chinese, such as Western-style blue jeans, Wang told the Daily Mail.
“He couldn’t sing, and when he tried to dance, he found it very hard. I could tell he was in the military,” Wang said.
Is Tim Walz America-last?
“But we talked for hours and hours, we stayed in bed, we had sex. He continued to buy me gifts.”
Walz returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1990, according to the Daily Mail, but continued to write. Wang said, Walz had her send a passport-style photo and information about herself.
As the Daily Mail described it, she thought “it was part of the process to secure her a visa.”
Wang even resigned her teaching position when Walz returned to China in 1992, “believing she was about to embark on a new life,” the Daily Mail reported.
It didn’t turn out that way.
The two took a 10-day trip together that ended in the resort area of Hainan Island, where Wang demanded to know where the relationship was going.
Walz responded that she was only using him to get a U.S. visa.
“This was very offensive. I said to him that it is both or nothing,” Wang told the Daily Mail.
“I wasn’t giving up my life and my position to move to Nebraska, a cold place in the middle of nowhere that most Chinese people had never heard of.
“I was giving it up to be with Tim, to get married and start a family.
“Knowing now that he wasn’t going to marry me made me feel cheap and common, as if I was being treated like a prostitute.”
Disconsolate, she said, she considered suicide, but instead decided to simply leave Walz when the trip continued.
“The bus stopped, but I didn’t get off. He said, ‘Please come and let’s talk. Let’s give this a chance,’” Wang told the Daily Mail.
“But I said ‘no.’ I felt dead inside. I wasn’t going to force a person to love me. I never saw Tim again.”
In a separate interview with the New York Post, Wang said the breakup forced her to move to a new area.
“I was deeply insulted, hurt, and I had to leave that place, because many people knew that we had a relationship,” she said.
Eventually, Wang emigrated to Europe, according to the Daily Mail.
The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment, according to both the Daily Mail and the New York Post, so there’s no way of knowing how much, if any, of Wang’s story is true.
And even if it’s all accurate, all of this is now ancient history.
But considering Walz’s pattern of misleading his listeners, it could also be relevant.
Walz — now 60 — has given the impression he was in combat with the National Guard when he wasn’t. He’s told listeners he was in Hong Kong during the Chinese Communist Party’s bloody repression of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989 when he wasn’t.
His only explanation when he’s confronted about what most people would consider lies is that he’s a “knucklehead.”
Wang told the Daily Mail the bigger lesson is more important than that.
“Tim lied about Tiananmen Square, and he’s lied about other things,” she said, according to the outlet.
“This is a very crucial moment in history, and a man like this does not appear to have the character and integrity to do one of the most important jobs in the world.”
Americans who’ve become familiar with the Tim Walz should have no problem agreeing with that.
This is the governor who stood idle while his state’s biggest city was overrun by rioters, a public figure who’s lied about everything from his military service to his own children’s conception, a politician who’s willing to be a wingman for the worst Democratic presidential candidate in a long history of really bad Democratic presidential candidates.
And considering he was chosen for the post by Harris, whose own husband has been accused of physically abusing a woman, it doesn’t make the top of the ticket look much better.
The past is coming back to haunt them both.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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