“Did Tampon Tim just say he has ‘become friends with school shooters?’” Trump wrote on Truth Social using the nickname he has given Walz. “He isn’t even qualified to be Governor, let alone Vice President. Walz and Kamala DO NOT HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!”
Trump then posted two video clips of Walz making the comment and two graphics with Walz’s picture alongside the quote about school shooters. Trump also shared a screenshot of a post on X from Andrew Pollack, the father of a victim of a school shooting, who wrote: “My daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting. It’s absolutely abhorrent that Tim Walz has befriended school shooters. Disqualifying.” Pollack’s post on X, which quotes a post from the official Trump War Room account, has been viewed 3.8 million times.
Moments later, Trump posted a meme of a mocked-up Trump-Vance yard sign with the tagline “Not Friends of School Shooters —a meme that was originally posted to X by Laura Loomer, a close ally of Trump who has, until recently, been seen traveling with the former president to campaign events.
Loomer, an antisemitic, far-right troll, took the conspiracy further, asking: “Was @Tim_Walz friends with Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh too?”—a reference to the men charged with attempting to assassinate Trump in recent months. Loomer also posted a mock-up poster for the sitcom Friends with the actors’ faces replaced by Walz and a number of mass shooters.
While most of the post-debate conversation on television focused on other aspects of the event, Trump was clearly unhappy that more people were not focusing on Walz’s gaffe. “Why aren’t the after shows talking about the fact that Walz said, ‘I’m friends with school shooters,’” Trump wrote around midnight on Tuesday.
But across the right-wing ecosystem of talking heads and pundits, the claim that Walz was friends with school shooters quickly took hold.
“Calling it right now but Tim Walz saying he’s “friends with school shooters” will be the #1 thing remembered about this debate,” Jack Posobiec, the far-right troll and Pizzagate promoter who was part of the official Trump campaign war room for the debate, wrote on Telegram. “It’s the ‘eating the cats’ of the VP debate.”
“Is it normal to befriend school shooters?” Charlie Kirk, the founder of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA group, wrote on Telegram.
Posobiec also posted multiple memes about the situation, including one showing Walz superimposed into a video of an actual school shooting. He also posted a video recorded by Chaya Raichik, who runs the hate-fiulled anti-LGBTQ account LibsofTikTok and was also in the GOP’s debate war room.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close ally of Trump, opened his post-debate show discussing the incident, claiming it “raises a lot of other questions” and failing to account for the fact that Walz misspoke.
Hundreds of other right-wing accounts on X posted clips of Walz’s comment without any context, dozens of them racking up millions of views on their posts. Others posted a clip of Walz after the debate getting pizza with his wife, when a reporter asked: “Can you clarify what you meant when you said you became friends with school shooters?” Walz refused to answer the question.