PHILADELPHIA – Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance charged on Monday that the closest his Democratic counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has come to military combat was during the May 2020 riots in Minneapolis that burned over 1,000 businesses and a police station to the ground.
“It occurred to me, the closest Tim Walz has ever come to combat, even though he says he carried a weapon of war, the closest Tim Walz has ever come to combat is when he let rioters burn Minneapolis to the ground a few years ago,” Vance said at a campaign event in Philadelphia, referencing the governor’s handling of the 2020 riots following the death of local resident George Floyd in police custody.
Walz, 60, retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 – months before his unit was deployed to Iraq – and he has never served on a battlefield despite claiming in past remarks to have done so.
“I swear, before, before the end of the campaign, Tim Walz is going to be talking about how he was carrying an M-16 through the jungles of Vietnam,” the Ohio senator said in another zinger Monday directed at Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.
“Everything that comes out of his mouth about his military service is at least 25% a lie,” Vance argued.
In one recently resurfaced clip of Walz from 2018, he argued for more stringent gun control based on his experiences in “war.”
“We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” he said.
The Harris campaign acknowledged earlier this month that the governor “misspoke” about his past military service.
Vance, speaking to small group of about 250 supporters and media members at DiSorb Systems, Inc. – a medical waste management company – in North Philadelphia, made the case that former President Donald Trump is better positioned than Harris to help American businesses.
“Let’s take stock of the Trump record, not just the vision, because Donald Trump isn’t just going out there making promises about what he wants to do,” the “Hillbilly Elegy” author said. “My friends, he already did it.”
Vance vowed that Trump is “going to unleash Pennsylvania’s energy workers.”
“We are going to drill baby drill,” he said. “We’re going to stop buying energy from tin-pot dictators all over the world who hate this country. We’re going to start buying it from our own land, from our own people, from our own workers.”
“When we do that, my friends, we’re going to bring down energy costs, not just for American families and American consumers – we’re going to bring it down for American manufacturers and American businesses like DiSorb,” Vance argued.
Trump, 78, trails Harris, 59, in Pennsylvania by 1.4 percentage points, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight average of polls.
The Keystone State has 19 Electoral College votes up for grabs in November.
Trump held a separate event focused on the economy in York, Pa., hours after Vance’s speech Monday.
