The Democratic vice-presidential candidate taught in China, ran a student travel programme there and sat on the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
In the first hours after US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, announced on Tuesday that her running mate would be Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump scrambled to find the harshest criticisms they could about the pick.
What did they home in on? From anonymous online posters to former Trump officials to hard-right news outlets, they went with Walz’s extensive personal history in China.
Numerous social media posts, including those from accounts followed by members of Trump’s inner circle, with some suggesting he could be a Communist Party agent.
“Communist China is very happy with @GovTimWalz as Kamala’s VP pick. No one is more pro-China than Marxist Walz,” Richard Grenell, a former acting director of National Intelligence in the previous Trump administration, posted on X, the social platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.
Gabriel Noronha, who served as an adviser to the Iran Action Group in Trump’s State Department, shared a quote purportedly by Walz in 2019 that called for “expanding military-military contacts” for a “solid, lasting partnership” with China.
A post on X by an account named Leskov Brandonovic said that “Tim Walz, who went ‘teaching’ in China, in 1989 of all years, and also has business there, opposed trade war against China. Why am I not surprised?”
The post included a 2019 statement from Walz that tariffs on Chinese imports were hurting American farmers.
The account has only 5,612 followers, but they include Donald Trump Jnr and Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary.
A report by The New York Post, long a supporter of Trump, carrying the headline “Tim Walz has fawned over Communist China”, soon rocketed across X.
After earning a degree in social science education in 1989, Walz, a Nebraska native, spent about a year teaching high school in China through Harvard University’s WorldTeach programme.
