Why Tim Walz is everything Donald Trump is not

Enough with the faux outrage already. Having failed abysmally to smear the military record of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz – he served honorably for 24 years in the Army National Guard – the most potent thing that the Republican Party’s oppo research on Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate has been able to come up with is a tenuous – and I mean really tenuous – connection between him and Imam Asad Zaman, a Muslim cleric who shared anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian social media posts following Hamas’ October 7 terrorist pogrom and who in 2015 promoted a documentary that praised Hitler.

The attempts to link Walz to Zaman in any meaningful way are not just bogus and far-fetched but dumb.

It was bound to happen. Politicians, especially successful politicians, associate with a whole host of personalities in the course of their career. Some of these individuals may well, in retrospect, turn out to be unsavory. Zaman falls squarely into that category. Moreover, Zaman is a prominent figure in Minnesota’s Muslim community and as such would be expected to be someone with whom the state’s governor might interact at official functions.

Now, no one is suggesting that Walz and Zaman are buddies or that they associate socially with one another. To the best of my knowledge, Walz never hosted Zaman for lunch or dinner at a fancy (or even not-so-fancy) country club. On one occasion in 2018, when Walz ran for governor the first time, he spoke at an event hosted by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota and praised Zaman, the organization’s executive director, as a “master teacher.” The two also appeared together at several public events, including a January 2019 news conference calling for the end of the federal government shutdown  and a May 2023 meeting – months before October 7 – regarding security concerns at local mosques.

There are no allegations that Walz knew or had reason to know of Zaman’s 2015 Facebook post in which he linked to the aforementioned neo-Nazi propaganda film. And yet, predictably, former President Donald Trump and his MAGA echo chamber are doing their usual hatchet job. Trump vilified Walz at a recent fundraiser for his connection to “a Hitler-supporting radical Muslim Imam named Asad Zaman.” That’s rich coming from the guy who said back in 2017 that there were “very fine people” among the tiki-torch carrying neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us.”

Along the same lines, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Republican Party’s Jewish arm, brayed that “It is an outrage to the American Jewish community that Tim Walz would champion Hitler-promoting cleric Asad Zaman.” These are the very same folks who contorted themselves into pretzels to avoid calling former President Donald Trump to task for his November 2022 Mar-o-Lago dinner with the antisemitic rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West (“I’m going Death con 3 on Jewish people”) and the even more antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes (“All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory . . . I’m just like Hitler”).

I am taking at face value Governor Tim Walz’s contention that he does not have and has not had a personal relationship with Zaman. I am also absolutely certain that Walz was unaware of Zaman’s social media post linking to the neo-Nazi film. Why and how can I be so certain? Because Walz has an impressive, even stellar, track record in the field of Holocaust education and Holocaust remembrance, dating back to his years as a high school teacher in Nebraska, long before he first entered Congress.

In 1995, shortly after the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington, D.C., he attended the museum’s Belfer National Conference for Educators. Subsequently, in 2001, he wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust and genocide education, arguing – correctly, in my opinion – that the Nazi mass killing of Jews during the Holocaust was not a stand-alone historical aberration to be taught as part of World War II history but instead should be viewed in the context of other genocides before and since. “To exclude other acts of genocide,” he maintained, “severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere.”

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Walz said in a 2008 interview with Samuel G. Freedman of The New York Times, which allowed students to see “the people who did this” as “monsters.” The problem with this approach, Walz explained, is that while it allowed students to understand that “what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters,” it also “relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

In 2023, he signed into law a bill mandating that the Holocaust and other genocides are taught in Minnesota high schools and middle schools.

What about the charge that Zaman was publicly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel in the aftermath of October 7? That reflects on Zaman, to be sure, but what does this have to do with Walz who condemned Hamas clearly and unambiguously at the time? Not even Walz’s Republican critics are claiming that he even knew about, let alone acquiesced in, Zaman’s views. On the contrary, speaking at a community rally in support of Israel at a Minneapolis synagogue on October 10, 2023, Walz said that there was “not an inch of space between the folks that are here tonight and their support of Israel and what’s right to be done,” and that “What was evident on [October 7] was the absolute lack of that humanity. The terrorism and the barbarism brought on – that’s not a geopolitical discussion. That’s murder.”

Walz also ordered all U.S. and Minnesota flags to fly at half-staff at all state buildings to honor the victims of the October 7 attack, reiterating that “Minnesota joins the nation in condemning the horrific acts of violence against Israeli civilians by Hamas.” Somehow, the Republican Jewish Coalition seems to have missed this part of the story.

Republicans have every right to take issue with Walz’s policies or political positions, or with Vice President Harris’ for that matter. But let me offer a word of unsolicited advice to the MAGA crowd: when the presidential candidate you’re supporting thinks that antisemitic neo-Nazis are “very fine people,” believes that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and dehumanizes his political opponents by referring to them as “vermin,” you might think twice or even three times before casting aspersions on Walz by insinuating disingenuously and falsely that he knew or had reason to know of Zaman’s social media link to a pro-Nazi film. With his proven decades-long commitment to Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education, Tim Walz is everything that Donald Trump is not.

Just saying.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).