GOP throwing everything against the Walz to see what sticks

The Trump campaign was pretty sure they’d hit on a nickname that would annihilate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz once and for all.

No vice presidential hopeful could possibly come back from this one. The schoolyard taunt to end all schoolyard taunts.

“Tampon Tim.”

Unfortunately, the fact that Minnesota passed a law to make sure students have the same free access to menstrual products as they do to toilet paper and soap sounded absolutely amazing to most Americans. Democrats immediately adopted “Tampon Tim” as a badge of honor. More free menstrual supplies, please and thank you.

In the two days since Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Walz as her running mate, the GOP dug deep, throwing insults and insinuations at the Walz to see what might stick.

On Thursday afternoon, Trump stepped up to a microphone at Mar-a-Lago to deliver an ominous word salad of a warning about Walz — without actually mentioning him by name.

Harris’s running mate is a “radical left, uh, man that is — he’s got things done that he, he’s got positions that it’s not even possible to believe that they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world. Heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders. He doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country. He doesn’t mind people coming in from prisons ... He couldn’t care less.”

The Trump team has tried hard to paint a Nebraska-born politician who managed to win and hold a bright-red rural Minnesota congressional district as a wild-eyed radical liberal. They’re trying to Swift Boat his 24 years of service in the Minnesota National Guard.

Bold move for a campaign headed by a five-time draft dodger to denigrate a veteran.

They dug so deep it’s astonishing that they haven’t resurfaced the “Minnesota allows school children to identify as cats and use litterboxes” allegations from the last gubernatorial election.

But back to the tampons — an incredibly on-brand talking point in an election that brought us the war on childless cat ladies.

Minnesota could have warned the Trump camp that throwing tampons around can backfire on a politician.

Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, celebrated the moniker and said she was “grateful” to partner with Walz on the legislation: “This law exemplifies what we can accomplish when we listen to students to address their needs. Excited to see MN representation at the top of the ticket!”

Hillary Clinton also highlighted the issue as a positive for Walz.

When West St. Paul Mayor Jenny Thompson Halverson, the first woman elected to that job, tried to appoint three women to the all-male City Council in 2018, someone crept through the night and dumped maxi pads, wrapped in a bow, on her doorstep and at the door of one of her proposed appointees.

At the next council meeting, more than 150 women showed up with armloads of tampons and maxi pads and some choice words for council members.

Women hold half the council seats in West St. Paul these days. And every year, the women of West St. Paul organize a tampon and maxi pad donation drive for Minnesotans in need. No doubt Tampon Tim would approve.