Even so, when he was asked about this, he still didn’t know what to say. He was acting just like a wide-eyed, scared Don Rickles without the jokes like he had just woken up on a vice-presidential debate stage and had no idea why he was there.
Colin Rugg of Trending Politics said on X, “Walz has said more than once that he was in Hong Kong during the tragedy in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.”
There were a lot of fact-checks on this one before Tuesday.
The New York Times (of all places) reported that Mr. Walz said on a podcast in February that he had been in Hong Kong, which was then a British colony, “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened” and that he had chosen to cross into mainland China to start teaching even though many people told him not to.
“It wasn’t true. The Democratic candidate for vice president, Mr. Walz, did teach at a high school in China as part of a program that sent American teachers there, but he didn’t go there until August 1989, the report said.”
Margaret Brennan, the moderator, told the crowd what happened and then asked, “Can you explain that difference?”
Walz began his answer to that question with the tired old line, “I grew up in a small, rural Nebraska town of 400.” This is never a good way to start an answer.
Following this, Walz stumbled around and looked nervous for two minutes while talking about how he “rode his bike under the streetlights” with his friends, joined the National Guard, and other things.
Then he finally told her that yes, as a teacher, he had been to China, but it was after the protests in Tiananmen Square.
It took him a long time to finally say that he was sorry and that he sometimes gets “caught up in the rhetoric.”
During his long answer, he said, “Now look, everyone in my town knows who I am.”
Republicans have tried to use the fact that Walz has lied about some parts of his background to show that he’s not as real as the Harris campaign says he is, MSNBC’s Clarissa-Jan Lim wrote in a live blog of the debate on the network’s website.
“Walz stumbled a bit in his answer, and it’s not good that he got caught again exaggerating what he had been through. We will see if that line of criticism against him strikes a chord with voters.”
