How the Trump campaign plans to try to define Tim Walz

(CNN) — Donald Trump’s campaign is already setting out to define Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as someone who will move the Democratic presidential ticket to the left – with a key focus on his record, senior Trump campaign advisers and people close to the former president told CNN.

Trump’s team spent the last several days compiling opposition research on Walz, in addition to other leading contenders to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. His advisers say that while they will pull on details from his 12 years in Congress, their goal is to paint Walz — a former teacher and Army National Guard veteran — as someone who has been in lockstep with progressives over the last four years and a key champion of the Biden administration’s policies.

“She found a 60-year-old White guy who has the same crazy ideas she does,” one of the advisers said. “With both [Harris] and Walz, you’re going to have multiple years of various records to go through, but the bottom line is, where has he been for the last four years? The last four years are what matter most.”

The Trump campaign, which has struggled over the last several weeks to find lines of attack that best work against Harris, said the Walz pick presents a new opportunity for them to reimagine their campaign playbook against her.

Key focal points in their expected attacks include arguing Walz has taken a liberal stance on the border, painting him as anti-gun and anti-cop, tying him to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, linking him to the Biden administration’s economic policies and questioning his record on foreign policy.

In Congress, Walz’s position on gun rights earned him backing from the National Rifle Association. But he’s since fallen out of favor with the gun lobby over his support for gun safety actions as governor.

Even before Harris formally announced Walz as her running mate, the Trump campaign had begun crafting a narrative around her decision.

On social media, the campaign and pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., immediately started pushing some of the research it had been gathering on Walz while it prepared for Harris’ announcement, calling him an “incompetent liberal.”

However, Walz in Congress was widely viewed as more of a moderate Democrat, having voted to strengthen the border, calling for deficit reductions and voting with Republicans against the bailout for big banks after the 2008 financial crisis.

As governor, he also signed a series of bipartisan bills – though the Trump campaign plans to focus more heavily on his more progressive measures, such as enshrining the right to abortion and gender-affirming care in Minnesota, as well as establishing universal gun background checks and signing a law to make 100% of the state’s electricity clean by 2040.

Harris campaign spokesman Michael Tyler pushed back on the Trump campaign’s attacks, saying in a statement to CNN: “In picking Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Vice President Harris has not only selected a veteran, a teacher, a football coach, and a public servant to be her governing partner, she has also cemented the fundamental contrast in this race between the Harris-Walz ticket which is fighting for working families and the Trump-Vance Project 2025 agenda that would unleash harm on Americans across the country.”

Tyler added that Harris and Walz will be pushing a “message of unity” over the next three months, with a focus on “building up the middle class instead of cutting taxes for the rich, and fighting for our fundamental freedoms, including reproductive freedom.”

The Trump campaign also plans to lean heavily into Harris’ decision not to pick Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro – even as Trump’s advisers and many people close to the former president privately acknowledge they were more concerned about Shapiro being on the ticket given the importance of winning his battleground state, the sources said.

Trump’s team plans to argue that Harris listened to far-left voices who were concerned about how Shapiro, who is Jewish, would handle the Israel-Hamas war. While both Walz and Shapiro have been defenders of Israel, the Pennsylvania governor had been attacked by some on the left for his comments about the tone of some college protests.

Trump allies are breathing a sigh of relief that Harris didn’t pick Shapiro, with one source close to Trump saying that Pennsylvania “is still definitely up for grabs,” following Walz’s selection.

While Trump has repeatedly said that vice presidential candidates don’t matter, both he and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, had zeroed in on Shapiro in their attacks in recent weeks, an indication of the threat that Shapiro could have posed to the Harris campaign.

Vance test drove some of the new attacks on Walz during a visit to Philadelphia on Tuesday – the first leg of a multi-stop tour of the 2024 battlegrounds this week.

He claimed Harris’ decision “highlights how radical Kamala Harris is.”

Vance also told CNN’s Kristen Holmes that he wants to debate Walz, but only after the governor becomes the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Democrats are in the final stages of officially nominating Harris as their presidential candidate after the virtual roll call vote concluded Monday. Under party rules, a separate vote to confirm Walz as the vice presidential candidate is not required.

Another messaging line the Trump campaign plans to home in on is Walz’s handling of civil unrest in the aftermath of the police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Vance on Tuesday told reporters that Harris and Walz “make an interesting tag team because of course, Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020.”

Even before Harris selected Walz, Trump had begun issuing such attacks against the governor on the subject.

“Every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago…Remember me? I couldn’t get your governor to act,” Trump told the crowd at his rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, last month, before falsely claiming that he, not Walz, activated the National Guard in response to the protests. It’s a reprisal of his 2020 claim that he got the Guard deployed over the objections of the state’s Democratic leaders.

“I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis, while Kamala Harris sided with the arsonist and rioters and raise money to bail out the criminals,” Trump said.

Walz – who served in the Army National Guard for 24 years – was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard, first activating it on May 28, more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.

Walz’s office said at the time that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities run by Democrats.

As for Trump’s claims that Harris bailed out Minnesota criminals, he was referencing a 2020 tweet in which Harris encouraged donations to a fund that received support to bail out protesters of Floyd’s death.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund is one of several US charities dedicated to helping low-income defendants post bail that boomed in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing. However, the fund, in addition to other charitable bail groups, later came under scrutiny after some defendants they bailed out were later arrested again for alleged acts of violent crime.

Trump campaign’s messaging blitz in action

Just moments after CNN and other outlets began reporting that Harris had selected Walz, the Trump campaign sent out fundraising appeals painting the Minnesota governor as someone who “would be the worst VP in history.”

“TIM WALZ WILL UNLEASH HELL ON EARTH! He’s already pulling in MILLIONS to WIPE MAGA OUT,” one fundraising text read.

Trump himself posted about Harris’ selection later Tuesday, writing on Truth Social  that the vice president and Walz are “the most Radical Left duo in American history.”

The campaign on Tuesday also released a new video, which it billed the first “reaction ad” to the pick, in which the narrator claims Walz “will be a rubber stamp for Kamala’s dangerously liberal agenda.”

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz: they’re failed, weak, and dangerously liberal,” the narrator says.

The video, which has already been pushed on social media, is expected to be part of an upcoming ad buy, a Trump campaign source told CNN, though they did not provide details on where or when it would air.

Linking Walz to Bernie Sanders

Congressional Republicans moved to label Walz — who represented a conservative-leaning rural district in the House that, both before and after his tenure, has been mostly dominated by Republicans — as “radical.” In particular, they focused on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ support for Walz and the governor’s handling of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

“Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her running mate confirms that the Democrat Party will anoint the most radical Far Left-wing ticket in history,” House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik declared in a statement.

“To the American people: If you had any doubt that Kamala Harris is deeply liberal, look no further than the fact that her VP pick was endorsed by Bernie Sanders,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst echoed that message, calling Walz “Bernie Sanders’ choice for VP.”

This headline and story have been updated with additional information.

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