Asking why anyone thinks Herschel Walker’s run for the U.S. Senate is a good idea stopped being a worthwhile exercise a long time ago. In short, his candidacy is absurd even by the low standards for GOP politicians in the post-Trump era.
Since announcing his candidacy, Walker has claimed to know of a cure for Covid-19, lied repeatedly about having a college degree, skipped debates with his former Republican primary rivals, avoided questions about his actual residency in Georgia and ugly episodes with domestic violence in his past. None of that stopped him from demolishing his competition in the GOP primary this past Tuesday, setting up a race against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who also happens to be the lineal occupant of the pulpit once stood in by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Feel how you want about Walker, a Republican and thus a member of a party that the overwhelming majority of Black voters reject for its blatant racism, running against the man who leads a historic and revered Black religious institution. Democrats don’t own Black voters, even in the absence of a sane alternative, and Walker, like all of us, is free to belong to whatever political party he likes.
The issue, as I’ve written before, is that almost every time Walker opens his mouth in public, literally nobody knows WTF he’s saying. I dare you to find the Candace Owens in your life, play her this interview and let her find a conservative talking point aligned with whatever this is:
CNN’s Chris Cillizza went to the trouble of transcribing it so you can see the words in actual English:
“Cain killed Abel and that’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation — what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they want to just continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights. And I think there’s more things we need to look into. This has been happening for years and the way we stop it is putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights.”
Social media decided to have a little fun at Walker’s expense:
But I decided against dunking on Walker’s mushmouth nonsense again, until I shared that clip with a friend this morning who, in jest, came up with maybe the only explanation that makes sense: Walker is trolling all of us with a one-man conspiracy to undermine the GOP by getting elected to the Senate under its banner. Once he’s in Washington, he’ll pull a WWE-style heel turn on Mitch McConnell and crew, giving the steel chair treatment to their plans to outlaw abortion, sling an AR-15 over every shoulder that can carry it and install Trump as president-for-life. I can hear the Stone Cold Steve Austin theme music now.
Yes, I know it’s a cockamamie idea riddled with problems, the first being Walker’s political IQ appears to be somewhere closer to Tyrone Biggums than Machiavelli, followed by the fact that undermining Republicans by deep-faking as a Republican only to run against an incumbent that shared your hidden values doesn’t seem like the juice is worth the squeeze.
But at this point, almost anything makes more sense than whatever it is Walker says when he speaks.