“Did Tampon Tim just say he’s befriended school shooters?” Trump wrote on Truth Social, using the nickname he gave Walz. “He is not even qualified to be Governor, much less Vice President. “Walz and Kamala DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!”
Trump then posted two video clips of Walz making the comment and two graphics with Walz’s photo along with the quote about school shooters. Trump also shared a screenshot of an X post by Andrew Pollack, the father of a school shooting victim, who wrote: “My daughter died in the Parkland school shooting. It is absolutely abhorrent that Tim Walz has befriended school shooters. “Disqualifying.” Pollack’s post onwhich cites a post from the official Trump War Room account, has been viewed 3.8 million times.
Moments later, Trump posted a meme of a mock Trump-Vance yard sign with the slogan “No friends of school shooters,” a meme that was originally posted on X by Laura Loomer, a close Trump ally who, Until recently, he has been seen traveling with the former president to campaign events.
Loomer, a far-right anti-Semitic troll, took the conspiracy further, asking: “Was @Tim_Walz also friends with Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh?”, referring to the men accused of trying to assassinate Trump in recent years. months. Loomer also posted a mock poster for the sitcom Friends with the actors’ faces replaced with Walz and several mass shooters.
While most of the post-debate television chatter focused on other aspects of the event, Trump was clearly unhappy that more people were not focusing on Walz’s mistake. “Why don’t the later shows talk about the fact that Walz said, ‘I’m friends with school shooters,'” Trump wrote around midnight Tuesday.
But throughout the right-wing ecosystem of commentators and pundits, the claim that Walz was friends with school shooters quickly took hold.
“Calling him right now but Tim Walz saying he’s a ‘friend of school shooters’ will be the first thing remembered in this debate,” said Jack Posobiec, the far-right troll and Pizzagate promoter who was part of the official war room of the Trump campaign during the debate, he wrote on Telegram. “It’s the ‘eat the cats’ of the vice president debate.”
“Is it normal to be friends with school shooters?” Charlie Kirk, founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, wrote on Telegram.
Posobiec also posted several memes about the situation, including one showing Walz superimposed on a video of a real school shooting. He also posted a video recorded by Chaya Raichik, who runs the hate-filled anti-LGBTQ account LibsofTikTok and was also in the GOP debate room.
Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host and close Trump ally, opened his post-debate show discussing the incident, stating that it “raises a lot of other questions” and disregarding the fact that Walz was wrong.
Hundreds of other right-wing accounts on X posted clips of Walz’s comment without any context, and dozens of them racked up millions of views on their posts. Others posted a clip of Walz after the debate eating pizza with his wife, when asked a journalist: “Can you clarify what you meant when you said you became friends with school shooters?” Walz declined to answer the question.