John Oliver on Sunday’s edition of “Last Week Tonight,” called out former President Donald Trump’s “desperate” attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris and her running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
The comedian skewered Trump for calling Harris “Kamabla” but noted that Republicans have reached new heights of vitriol because of Walz’s favor with the public.
“The seeming panic in the Trump campaign right now is perhaps best exemplified by their reaction to Harris’s choice of Tim Walz, your friend’s nice dad, as her VP candidate this week. In terms of general vibe, he’s basically the exact opposite of JD Vance,” Oliver said.
To compare the veteran and former teacher to Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Oliver played a clip of Vance’s response to a reporter asking him what makes him smile. Oliver joked that Vance learned how to laugh through reading about it in books or comics, “saw it written out phonetically, and intellectually understood the noises Archie made.”
But to Oliver, Walz is the more personable option of the two. “Clearly, you don’t have to ask Walz what makes him smile. You can see it right there or in photos of him doing everything from holding a piglet to getting hugged by kids after signing universal free school meals into law, to him here, seemingly remembering that he isn’t JD f***ing Vance.”
The comedian went through Walz’s career, highlighting he was a teacher and footfall coach who advised his school’s Gay Straight Alliance in 1999 because “it really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz said.
Despite Walz’s record, Republicans are attempting to find ways to level attacks on the governor. Oliver said they have branded him “as a socialist, which he isn’t, labeling him as ‘Tampon Tim’ for providing feminine hygiene products in schools, and even getting angry at the fact Minnesota’s state flag was changed on his watch.”
The change of the flag was “mainly as a result of objections to the depiction of a Native American on the old flag” and Walz “wasn’t the one who pushed for the change; he just happened to be governor at the time,” Oliver explained.
That still wasn’t enough for Republicans to back down from Walz as they began to target his military service. The politician served “24 years in various units and jobs in the Army National Guard.” But this week, he was accused of “stolen valor” for allegedly saying he carried a weapon of war in war — which he did not.
“He never actually saw combat, and the campaign’s said he misspoke,” Oliver explained. “But Republicans didn’t stop there with J.D. Vance and others also trying this line of attack.” These false statements alluded to Walz dropping out of the National Guard ahead of his unit’s deployment overseas.
Again, Oliver stated that wasn’t true, “Walz retired in May of 2005. His unit wasn’t ordered to mobilize until July of that year, and didn’t deploy to Iraq until 2006.”
As there are 85 days until election day, Oliver said, “it’s going to feel incredibly long. And it’s plenty of time for the GOP to draw up attacks far more vicious and hateful than ‘Kamabla,’ while also figuring out more inventive ways to attack her running mate.”
He concluded: “It does seem telling that so much of their attack strategy seems to boil down to a nonsense word and false accusations of stolen valor, two desperate smear attempts, with one thing in common: they reveal the Trump campaign’s currently got absolutely nothing.”
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver airs on Sundays at 11 p.m. ET on Max.
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