'Kamala caved': Trump and his allies cast the Walz pick as liberal overload

Donald Trump and his allies moved quickly Tuesday to define Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, casting Vice President Kamala Harris’ new running mate as an agent of the far left.

Walz, the Trump campaign posited in a list of talking points obtained by NBC News, rounds out a “team of radicals.” Dave McCormick, the Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, branded Harris-Walz as “the most liberal presidential ticket in history.” Others took similar tacks.

Follow live updates here

It’s a messaging playbook that would not have worked so cleanly against the Democrat many Republicans feared Harris would pick: Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Even before President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris as his successor, GOP insiders had envisioned a Harris-Shapiro partnership, and those calculations factored into Trump choosing Sen. JD Vance of neighboring Ohio as a Rust Belt-reinforcing running mate.

“Instead of picking the candidate with charisma and a moderate record, Kamala caved to the Hamas caucus and picked a charisma black hole with a long record of supporting extreme liberal policies and a history of being close to China,” said a source close to the Trump campaign, who requested anonymity to share candid thoughts and specifically noted left-wing scrutiny over Shapiro’s record on Israel and denunciations of pro-Palestinian protesters.

A top Trump adviser added: “Hamas Harris bent the knee to antisemitic, anti-Israel radicals on the left by leapfrogging Shapiro. She chose someone as dangerously liberal as she is.”

In a late morning post on Truth Social, Trump seemed jubilant, although it was not immediately clear whether his two-word message was responding directly to the news that Harris