No, Tim Walz Is Not Friends With School Shooters

“Did Tampon Tim just say ‘befriend the school shooters?'” Trump wrote on Truth Social using the nickname he gave Walz. “He is not fit to be the Governor, let alone the Vice President. Walz and Kamala DON’T NEED IT!”

Trump then posted two video clips of Walz making the comments and two photos with a picture of Walz alongside a quote about school shooters. Trump also shared a screenshot of a post on X by Andrew Pollack, the father of the school shooting victim, who wrote: “My daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting. It is absolutely disgusting that Tim Walz has been friends with school shooters. Ineligibility.” Pollack’s post on X, which quotes a post on the official Trump War Room account, has been viewed 3.8 million times.

Moments later, Trump posted a funny Trump-Vance yard sign meme with the tagline “Not Friends of School Shooters”—a meme sent to X by Laura Loomer, a close friend of Trump who, until recently, was seen traveling with the former president to campaign events.

Loomer, an anti-Semitic, far-right activist, pushed the conspiracy further, asking: “Was @Tim_Walz friends with Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh too?”—referring to the men accused of trying to kill Trump in recent months. Loomer also posted a mock poster for the sitcom Friends with the characters’ faces replaced by Walz and a number of shooters.

While much of the post-debate discussion on television focused on other aspects of the event, Trump was clearly unhappy that so many people were not focused on Walz’s gaffe. “Why don’t the backstage shows say Walz said, ‘I’m friends with the school shooters,'” Trump tweeted at midnight Tuesday.

But throughout the right-wing ecosystem of talking heads and pundits, the claim that Walz was friends with the school shooters quickly caught on.

“I’m calling it right now but Tim Walz saying ‘don’t be friends with school shooters’ will be the #1 thing remembered for this debate,” Jack Posobiec, a troll and Pizzagate influencer who was part of Trump’s official war room. debate, wrote in Telegram. “It’s feeding the ‘cats’ of the VP 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 a number of memes about the situation, including one showing Walz taped up on video of the actual school shooting. He also posted a video recorded by Chaya Raichik, who runs the hate-filled anti-LGBTQ account LibsofTikTok and was in the GOP war room.

Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host and close friend of Trump, opened his post-debate program discussing the incident, saying it “raises a lot of other questions” and failed to address the fact that Walz misspoke.

Hundreds of other right-wing accounts on X posted clips of Walz’s comments without any context, many of which amassed 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’re friends with school shooters?” Walz declined to answer the question.