The story is the Trump-Harris fight has shifted to the Vance-Walz battlefront, with mainstream media aligning with Walz even as the Trump campaign has begun targeting Kamala Harris for "campaigning from the basement”, in the same manner President Joe Biden campaigned in 2020. Then, in the primary, Kamala Harris was outperformed by Joe Biden who went on to choose Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Now, four years on, Walz is taking the hits on behalf of Harris and the fast-talking democratic VP pick is being fact-checked every next day; especially his “military falsehoods”. Both Walz and Vance are "military veterans" and discrediting Walz’s military record is the “right’s newest line of attack” against Kamala Harris.

Tim Walz has been charged with “stolen valour”, and is fast becoming the victim of “swiftboating”. The Trump campaign has borrowed from 2004, when the Bush-Kerry campaign was targeted using Swift Boat veterans from Vietnam to scrutinize John Kerry’s service record.

The attacks on Tim Walz’s “years of lies” has now become the Trump campaign’s mainstay. The Trump campaign is under stress and is using its own veteran, JD Vance, to expose Walz’s military record. “There’s more than enough evidence to prove that he did commit Stolen Valor. We will make sure the American people know that, especially our great veterans and service members who have honourably answered the call to serve and answered the call to go overseas when their country asked them to do that,” says the Trump campaign.

Senator Vance, according to the Trump followers, didn’t play truant and avoid serving the defence forces. "He answered the call and deployed to Iraq when his country called on him and honourably served in the United States Marine Corps.” The Trump campaign says JD Vance’s “personal biography” beats Walz’s train of lies even as media reports claim Kamala Harris is beating Donald Trump on all polls.

This started from the day Trump cast doubts on Kamala’s race, telling a trio of “black American journalists” that Kamala had covered up her “Indian heritage” and adopted “Black American heritage” to fight the Senate polls. Since then, Trump has had it uphill and the opinion polls, which waltzed in favour of Kamala Harris when she picked Tim Walz for running mate on the basis of a single word “weird” with which Walz described Trump and Vance.

Word “weird” has been dogging the Trump-Vance ticket, with Vance being the primary “weird”, putting Trump-Vance on the back-foot. That said, Kamala Harris has herself waltzed away from answering tough questions. Kamala Harris is doing a Narendra Modi on the American public by refusing to sit down for a press conference. “Kamala Harris has done as many tough interviews as Tim Walz has battlefield deployments,” JD Vance tweeted on Elon Musk’s ‘X’` on August 11. Videos to discredit Walz’s military record are all over ‘X’, after Walz is heard saying in one, “Those weapons of war that I carried in war” should stay only in combat. “The governor never saw combat,” Social Media erupted.

Walz is Minnesota Governor and was in the Minnesota National Guard for 24 years. He deployed in Italy in 2003 and veterans, who served with him, accuse Walz of retiring from the National Guard in 2018 “to run for Congress” after he came to know he would be deployed to Iraq. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi praises Walz for “serving in the battlefield” but Vance accused Tim Walz of “stolen valour”, citing his own record of being a “Marine in uniform” and serving in Iraq.

“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, a fact that he has been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” Vance said even as some media deployed cast the attacks on Kamala’s VP choice as “as dishonest or unimportant.”

In 2004, Democratic candidate John Kerry was the target of “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which questioned Kerry’s Vietnam record. Twenty years on Tim Walz is getting the same treatment from “swiftboating”, which media friendly to Kamala Harris says is “representative of slimy politics”, and which “focuses attacks on the running mate, not the principal.”

Swift-boating, say Tim Walz’s supporters, is “unfair or untrue political attack”. The goal is to force Walz to confirm or deny whether he did a tour in Iraq or not. “The two biggest sins in the military are claiming credit for decorations you don’t have or claiming combat action that you did not participate in … And this much is certain: He’s guilty of at least one of them,” the Trump campaign said. “Nothing regarding his lies has been weaponized in a political sense. That’s about to change....everybody looking at him and seeing his chameleon skin and realizing that, you know, this guy is a liar and a fraud.” Problem for Walz is more veterans are are coming out and swift-boating him. (IPA Service)