Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, was caught in a lie live on national TV this week.
During the vice presidential debate that took place on CBS on Tuesday, Walz admitted he “misspoke” when he said he was in China in 1989 for the infamous protests at Tiananmen Square.
On repeated occasions, Walz has said that he was in the country for the protests while he was a high school teacher for a year in a town called Foshan, which is located in the southeastern section of China.
He said on the “Pod Save America” podcast in February, in fact, that he was in Hong Kong while the protests were going on. As he said on that show:
“I was in Hong Kong when it happened — i was in Hong Kong on June 4th when Tiananmen happened. … Quite a few of our folks decided not to go in.”
ABC News, though, obtained local newspaper clippings that showed Walz didn’t travel to China until August of 1989.
The protests that took place in Hong Kong, which were in favor of a democratic government, started on April 15 and lasted through June 4 of 1989, which would have been roughly two months before Walz even traveled to China.
The protests eventually led to the Chinese government cracking down on the protesters, which led to people dying.
When Walz was pressed during this week’s debate about the claims he made, Walz replied that he only “misspoke.” However, he reiterated he “was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest.”
Walz, of course, didn’t directly respond to the question posed to him, but he tried to defend his character nonetheless. He said that he has some gaffes, has “not been perfect” and is a “knucklehead at times.”
It was a pretty sloppy response, to say the least, and one that certainly made him look like much less of a fit for vice president than Republican JD Vance, the first-term U.S. senator from Ohio.
It’s also not the first time that Walz has been the center of attention for something he “misspoke” about things that happened in his past.
Many critics have attacked how Walz has characterized his military experience. They’ve pointed out multiple times that he failed to correct some inaccuracies about his record in the military.
The Minnesota governor has on multiple occasions said that he retired having a certain rank in the military that he didn’t end up retiring with. He also said back in 2018 that he carried weapons of war “in war,” which ended up not being true.
That last statement is something that the Harris-Walz campaign admitted previously was another time when Walz “misspoke” about his past.
It begs the question of how it’s possible for a major political candidate to misspeak this frequently, especially about things in his own past. Those things should be easy for Walz to recall without a problem.
