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John Oliver has mocked Donald Trump and JD Vance for their “more than a little desperate” attempts to smear Tim Walz’s military record, calling the “stolen valor” claims nothing more than “thin gruel.”
On Sunday night’s show, the Last Week Tonight host went through the Trump campaign’s recent efforts to steal the limelight from Kamala Harris and her running mate – efforts that he said are so far failing to make any real impact on the Democratic bid for the White House.
“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,” Oliver said.
“Two desperate smear attempts with one thing in common: they reveal the Trump campaign has currently got absolutely nothing.”
Among the many attack lines the Trump campaign has tried out, the comedian pointed out that the “stolen valor” accusations against Walz were especially failing to land.
“Even the hard-right Wall Street Journal editorial board said the charges leveled so far about his military service look like thin gruel,” Oliver quipped, according to The Daily Beast.
Vance has accused the Minnesotan governor of exaggerating his military record and abandoning his crew right before deployment to Iraq.
In 2003, Walz deployed for nine months during the war in Afghanistan, providing security at US bases in Europe, but did not take part in combat. He retired from the National Guard in May 2005 while he was running for Congress.
It was one year later when his unit was deployed to Iraq.
Republicans have also tried to attack Walz for changes to the Minnesotan flag, claiming he changed it to resemble an autonomous state in Somalia.
After replacing the previous flag because of its insensitivity to Native Americans, the new flag shares the the colour blue and a star with the state of Puntland, sparking a wave of horror from Republican lines.
Pointing out how ludicrous the claim is, Oliver exclaimed: “What are you talking about? Have you seen flags? They’re all some combination of colors, stars, and in the case of Sicily, a three-legged monster with a head for a vagina.
“That’s really more of a ‘Sicily’s gonna Sicily’ situation.”
Oliver went on to point out that Walz was not the key figure behind the flag change but rather “just happened to be governor at the time.”
The late-night host listed a string of other flailing attack lines by Trump and Vance, which altogether show that the campaign has “currently got absolutely nothing” on their rivals.
Oliver spoke of Trump’s “confusing” playground tactic of trying to hit Harris with a new nickname.
“Laffin’ Kamala,” “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Crazy Kamala” have all cropped up, but when Trump took to Truth Social last week to rant about “Kamabla”, Americans were truly stumped as to whether this was an intended nickname or just an unfortunate spelling error.
“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,” Oliver said.
“Two desperate smear attempts with one thing in common: they reveal the Trump campaign has currently got absolutely nothing.”
The attempts to drag down Harris and Walz come as Trump is reportedly in a meltdown over his trailing poll results, with the latest poll putting Harris two points ahead.
While Harris’s campaign has gone from strength to strength with a rise in polls and huge fundraising hauls, Trump and Vance have faced criticism for a series of attacks on their opponents.
Trump came under fire for questioning Harris’s race in comments made in front of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago on 31 July.
This came after Vance faced backlash after 2021 comments calling Harris and other Democrats “childless cat ladies” resurfaces.
He stood by his comments in an ABC News interview with Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, frankly, distorted what I said,” Vance said. “They turn this into a policy proposal that I never made.”
