Casual followers of American politics could be forgiven for believing that the Democrats had named Minnesota Tim Walz as their presidential nominee, judging by the sheer volume of half-baked right-wing attacks on Kamala Harris’s running mate. The MAGA faithful, under the direction of Walz’s GOP counterpart JD Vance, began by going after Walz for ditching his National Guard unit prior to its deployment in Iraq (in reality, said deployment was announced after Walz retired from the Guard, to mount his initial campaign for Congress in 2006). They then worked themselves into a lather about Walz’s occasional characterization as the football coach at Mankato High School—he was the squad’s defensive coach. Among ordinary users of the English language, such modest confusion originates from the ambiguous meaning of the term “coach” in everyday speech; for the American right’s orthodoxy enforcers, the misappropriated job title was nothing less than a thoughtcrime, aimed squarely at the heart of the country’s civil religion of football. (This pedantic non-scandal lately got a fresh boost on the right after Walz, charged at a Boston fundraiser with demonstrating that “football coaches are not the dumbest people,” joked that he was “the anti-Tommy Tuberville,” referencing the former college coach turned GOP senator from Alabama.)

After the GOP’s pincer movement on Walz’s résumé went bust, party flacks started in on his governing record. They charged that Walz had dithered over authorizing National Guard units to respond to the 2020 George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, allowing protesters to wreak mayhem on the city, and burn down a police precinct. That line of attack hit a major roadblock when ABC News released an audio tape of then-President Trump lavishly praising Walz’s handling of the Minneapolis uprising. (Trump had also, hilariously, appointed Walz as the Democratic cochair of the National Council of Governors.) From there, Republican attacks rapidly pivoted into kitchen-sink mode. Walz spearheaded a campaign to make the Minnesota state flag in the image of Somalia’s, in a move that clearly telegraphed his determination to make the Land of 10,000 Lakes a failed Third World state. (Spoiler alert: No, he didn’t.) Walz mandated that all Minnesota public schools stock tampons in boys’ bathrooms, in fealty to the trans agenda. (Wrong again—Walz just signed legislation to make tampons free in the schools, yet this bogus talking point prompted bogus journalists like Megan Kelly to grace Walz with the not-at-all-weird nickname “Tampon Tim.”)

Last week, the dam broke and the right set about hysterically pathologizing virtually every word and gesture authored by Walz. After the Harris campaign released an anodyne video featuring a conversation between the candidates about music and food preferences, Walz’s joke that he ate “white-guy tacos”—beef, cheese, and virtually no seasoning—provoked a hue and cry among right-wing tone policers as still more telltale evidence that Walz was race betrayal personified. (In a new low for bathetic incoherence on the right, Walz was accused of engaging in “white minstrelsy.”) Mike Cernovich, the right-wing influencer who put the Pizzagate conspiracy on the map, went the extra mile to unearth a prize-winning Walz recipe featuring—da-DUM!—actual spices. When Walz procured Harris a bag of Doritos on the candidates’ western Pennsylvania bus tour—a callout to a Harris fundraising e-mail that described the presumptive nominee downing a whole family-sized bag of nacho Doritos as she watched the 2016 election returns in disbelieving horror—the online right once again assailed Walz for his cuck-like cosplaying at “humaning.” (Of course, when Walz displays widely recognizable human emotions on the stump, that creeps out the right as well.) As I write, dipshit Wisconsin GOP Senator Ron Johsnon has taken to the airwaves to question Walz’s love of country because he made the date of the Tiananmen Square uprising his wedding anniversary—an issue sure to resonate with the kitchen-table concerns of swing-state voters.

There will doubtless be more scorched-earth attacks on the Democratic vice-presidential nominee by the time this piece posts—perhaps the candidate will be found to have secretly hoarded Chinese spices, causing the online MAGA world to spontaneously combust—but you get the general picture: Tim Walz has driven the Trumpian commentariat quite mad. How could a concentrated dose of “Minnesota nice” in camo attire do such a thing?

It’s a well-worn cliché at this point that every attack from the MAGA right is an act of projection—that, say, the conspiracy maunderings of QAnon are an elaborate effort to launder the psychic trauma of nominating a serial sexual assaulter and Jeffrey Epstein crony to lead your movement for moral renewal. But cliches can still be true, and Walz’s political ascension provokes such unhinged replies for a simple reason: If he and Harris prevail in November, the Democrats will have demolished the sturdiest plank of MAGA mythology—the notion that the Caligulan heir to a New York real estate fortune is the fearless Real American tribune of the white working class’s struggles and woes. The projection is blindingly plain at the Walz attack’s point of origin, the “stolen valor” fantasia about his National Guard service. Donald Trump is notoriously a four-time student deferment case who not only likened the AIDS crisis to his “personal Vietnam,” but recently—and repeatedly—slandered recipients of the military Medal of Honor in favor of the Medal of Freedom he graced on hard-right mega-donor Miriam Adelson (whom, for the record, he also insulted in text messages about her pet MAGA super PAC).

The coach-baiting attack serves much the same purpose, clearly echoing Trump’s demagogic attacks on Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who staged silent protests against police killings of unarmed Black men (a moment consigned to the MAGA memory hole after the George Floyd uprising). The placement of a successful football strategist on a Democratic ticket strikes a direct blow at the lovingly tended fable that right-wingers are the de facto managers of America’s most popular sport. And on down the line, virtually all of Walz’s accomplishments, wardrobe choices, food tastes, playlists, and hobbies all serve to rub the MAGA commentariat’s face in the rickety self-serving lies undergirding the myth of Trump country as an organic outgrowth of heartland anomie. Most of all, his stump of politics as a communal and joyful quest for the common good, much like the self-improving rites of collaboration on the football field, expose the MAGA shtick as a depraved millionaire’s plaything. Walz thus must be exposed as a foul, illegitimate, inauthentic poser—before the nation comes to the same conclusion about the vast army of Trumpian grifters who loudly laid claim to their vacuous culture-war credentials as heroic defenders of the white working class in 2016. (Yes, I’m looking at you, JD Vance.)

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Perhaps the most revealing feature of the American right’s Walz-stomping campaign is that it seems to gain greatest intensity when Walz hazards a joke—about the low spice tolerance of white Midwestern dudes, football coaches as blockheads, Harris’s emo session with a bag of Doritos on election night, and (not least by a long shot) the incorrigible weirdness of Trump, Vance, et al. This, too, is an instance of Walz serenely pulling off what Trump’s alleged to do in the most labored and thudding manner: making sport of the political scene and his rivals. The MAGA messaging complex has deemed virtually every ugly attack, racist, and misogynist applause line and dubiously signifying rant from their political mascot a joke that the PC press and humorless libs simply don’t get. Yet Trump has demonstrated over and over again that he speaks in deadly earnest, and is almost never actually funny.

Besides achieving genuine comic effect under his own steam, Walz also pokes fun at himself—a common line of raillery in the Midwest, and something that’s utterly unthinkable for a raging megalomaniac like Trump. (Indeed, most accounts of Trump’s long-deferred turn toward presidential politics indicate that it was rooted in Barack Obama’s mockery of his racist birther campaign during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.) Walz’s ease with a joke conveys not merely that he’s comfortable in his own skin—which happens to be just as white as his counterpart’s. It also points up just how desperately humorless, tone-deaf, and insecure the messengers of the MAGA revolution are. I could refer you here to the entirety of Greg Gutfeld’s career, but the most cogent proof text is the excruciating spectacle of JD Vance trying to pull off a joke on the stump. In the end, what’s most galling about Tim Walz to the leaders of the MAGA media complex is that he foreshadows a time, perhaps in the not so distant future, when they are all destined to become punch lines.