In VP Debate, Tim Walz Tongue-Tied on Alleged Tiananmen Lies, Shows He Can’t Be Trusted

Tuesday’s vice presidential debate was a resounding win for President Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance.

Even establishment news outlets admitted that Vance was remarkably poised and confident during the debate, while Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz was nervous and stumbling. Columnists at the New York Times, known for its desperate anti-Trump bias, were compelled to write things like “[Vance is] a talented communicator,”  “for Vance, it was a commanding performance,” and “Vance ran circles around Walz.” By contrast, Walz, who called himself a “knucklehead” during the debate, seemed to just be running scared. Following Walz’s disastrous debate performance, it is evident that he is not fit to lead the American people as first-in-line to the Commander-in-Chief.

It is safe to say that Tim Walz is not just creepily obsessed with Communist China but is also a pathological liar. One glaring moment that reflects this came when he was asked by a debate moderator to clarify whether he had been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989, as he had previously claimed.

For example, Walz stated during a 2014 Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing commemorating the 25th anniversary of the massacre – in which estimated hundreds to thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – that he “was in Hong Kong in May 1989” and that “as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.”

However, recent reporting has brought to light that it appears Walz was still in Nebraska during the protests, with a photograph published by Nebraska’s Alliance Times-Herald in mid-May 1989 showing him working in a National Guard Armory in Alliance, Nebraska, with the note that Walz “will be moving to Alliance.”

Another article published in Nebraska’s Chadron Record in August 1989, more than two months after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, reported that Walz “will leave Sunday [August 13, 1989] enroute to China.” It added that Walz would be traveling to China to teach English with a program called WorldTeach, after having “about given up on participating earlier this summer during the student revolts in parts of China.” “Since the revolts have subsided,” the paper reported, Walz subsequently decided “to go ahead with the plans.”

This simple question was put to Walz by a CBS debate moderator:

“You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?”

Walz’s painfully convoluted non-answer began with something like one of Kamala Harris’ go-to opening phrases, “I come from the middle class,” that she uses when she wants to avoid answering a question. Walz began his word salad answer by saying he “grew up in small, rural Nebraska,” in a town “where you rode your bike with your buddies ‘til the streetlights come on,” and that he is “proud of that service.” Now, one may ask, what kind of an answer is that, and why would he weirdly lie about being in China?

By the way, the out-of-place invocation of the word “service,” to describe riding his bike growing up, brings to mind Walz’s false statement in 2018, which resulted in accusations of stolen valor, that he carried “weapons of war…in war.” The reality is that in 2005, Walz quit his National Guard unit before it was deployed to Iraq in order to run for Congress and was eventually demoted in rank, while Vance deployed to Iraq as a Marine in the same year.

Walz continued, while still not answering the moderator’s basic question, by describing the numerous trips to China that he organized in the 1990s and 2000s with his private travel company, during which time he took “travel cost” payments from the Chinese government. A full minute and a half into his rambling and evasive non-answer, Walz, grasping for his next sentence to fill time, said that “Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us,” and falsely claimed that President Trump started a trade war with China.

On top of the fact that the notion of Donald Trump starting a trade war with China is directly out of the CCP’s propaganda playbook and echoed by their state-funded media, Walz also fails to realize that Communist China had been unilaterally waging a trade war against the United States for decades before President Trump stood up for our nation and American workers using tariffs and other policies.

The Trump trade war statement in the debate is also consistent with Walz’s CCP accommodation strategy, echoing a call that he made in 2019 for President Trump to “end the trade war with China.” That same year, again waving the white flag of surrender toward China, Walz claimed, “There’s just no substitute for 1.6 billion consumers, who are hungry, to get our trade negotiations normalized” and “there’s not enough market in the rest of the world to absorb our capacity.”

During the response, Walz also made the strikingly blunt admission to the American people, “I’m a knucklehead at times.”

The moderator, in a tone reminiscent of the judge’s reaction to Adam Sandler’s academic decathlon response in the comedy Billy Madison (“everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it”), repeats, “The question was, can you explain the discrepancy?”

When pressed in this way on whether he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Walz, visibly squirming and sheepish, makes a garbled and seemingly contradictory remark:

“No, just, all’s I said on this was is I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so, I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in. And from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

So, in this statement during the debate, Walz first says he “misspoke” about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which was the CCP’s response to democracy protests in China, but then haltingly repeats the claim that he “was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest.”

And Walz repeats this claim despite reporting in 1989 by the Nebraska newspaper The Chadron Record that he didn’t travel to Asia from the United States until more than two months after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

During the vice-presidential debate, Tiananmen Tim Walz showed, yet again, not only that he is a “knucklehead,” as he explicitly admitted. He also showed that he and Kamala Harris simply can’t be trusted by the American people.

Joanna Wischer was a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under President Trump where she worked on advancing the Buy American, Hire American initiative. She currently serves as a policy analyst on the Donald Trump for President 2024 campaign. All opinions expressed on Substack are her own and not affiliated with the campaign.

Adam Molon is a guest columnist for Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America, a China scholar, and the author of NewSentry.