Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said in 2010 that his plan for Social Security was ‘very similar’ to one that would increase the retirement age and adjust the cap on withholdings. 

The Harris campaign is pushing back after Fox News Digital reviewed the unearthed clip from a debate Walz participated in during his 2010 re-election campaign for Congress. The debate was on Oct. 12, 2010, and was held at Minnesota State University, Mankato. 

Walz, the Democratic candidate and incumbent, faced off against Independent candidate Steve Wilson and Republican Randy Demmer. 

Wilson laid out his plan first, which discussed gradually increasing the retirement age. Walz answered after, saying his approach would be ‘very similar.’ 

Harris for President spokesperson Joseph Costello, though, told Fox News Digital that Walz ‘does not support raising the retirement age, and in fact, Walz has repeatedly voted to protect Social Security and against GOP efforts to raise the retirement age.’ 

During the 2010 debate, the three candidates were asked, ‘In regard to the federal budget deficit: what would you do about Social Security and Medicare with regard to the deficit?’ 

Wilson, the independent candidate, answered first. 

‘Social Security is one that we can fix, and we just have to all put on our thinking of what we’re going to have shared sacrifice… There are three different groups of people that are affected by Social Security: one, the group that are paying in; second, the ones that are ready to retire; and third, the ones that are receiving benefits,’ Wilson said. 

Wilson said those paying into the program currently have caps on the amounts taken out of their paychecks. 

‘If we would allow that to go a little higher, then we could bring more revenue in,’ he said. 

Wilson then said the retirement age should be raised. 

‘If we look at the second group, those who are retiring, if we adjusted that retirement age a little bit and give people enough warning – remember shared sacrifice, not just you getting affected, everybody,’ Wilson said. 

Wilson then said the individuals getting benefits from Social Security should have the Cost of Living and Adjustments (COLA) amounts adjusted.

On Wilson’s website, he further explained his position, which stated: ‘The age of retirement would gradually start to increase within three years of the deployment of the safety net. It would continue to be indexed to life expectancy over the longer term.’ 

When it was Walz’s turn, he endorsed Wilson’s plan. 

‘Social Security is absolutely critical. It is the greatest anti-poverty program the world’s ever seen,’ he said. 

‘Social Security, as Steve Wilson said, who has very good ideas on Social Security, he’s thought about it – he’s being honest about it – he’s laid out a plan that I think is very similar to the approach that I would take in working with them on that,’ Walz said. 

Walz, during that debate, advocated against any ‘partial privatization’ of Social Security. He also said his family was personally affected by Social Security after his father died when he was in high school. 

‘Social Security Survivor Benefits that were there to make sure that we had the bootstraps that we could pull ourselves up by,’ he said. ‘They were loaned to us by Social Security. It’s a smart program.’ 

A source familiar with Walz’s views at the time told Fox News Digital that ‘Walz does not support raising the retirement age now, and that is not what he suggested in this 14-year-old, misrepresented exchange.’

The source said that after winning his race in 2010, Walz went on to oppose plans to raise the retirement age. In 2012, he voted against raising the age to 68; in 2012, he voted against raising the age to 70; and in 2014, he again voted against raising the retirement age to 70.

When asked for comment, the Harris campaign stressed that Walz does not support raising the retirement age, and, while serving in Congress, voted against efforts to raise the retirement age. 

‘For nearly two decades, as a governor and congressman, Walz has been a strong defender of Social Security,’ Costello said in a statement to Fox News Digital. ‘Like the Biden-Harris Administration, he supports shoring up Social Security by having the super-wealthy pay their fair share.’ 

Costello added: ‘When he was a teenager, it kept his family afloat after his dad, a veteran, passed away from lung cancer.’

EAU CLAIRE, WI – Standing in front of over 15,000 supporters packed into an airport hanger at the airport in Detroit, Michigan, Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed that ‘this election’s going to be a fight.’

‘We like a good fight,’ added Harris, who rose to the top of the Democratic Party’s 2024 ticket two and a half weeks ago after President Biden suspended his re-election bid and endorsed his vice president as his successor.

Hours earlier in neighboring Wisconsin, another crucial battleground state that will also likely determine the outcome of the presidential election between Harris and former President Trump, the vice president’s newly named running mate took aim at Trump.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, enjoying what seemed like a hometown crowd at a rally just an hour from his own state, spoke to a sea of supporters – over 12,000 who had waited in line for hours on the roads and farm fields of mostly rural northwest Wisconsin to see Harris and her running mate.

Walz charged that the former president ‘sees the world differently than we see it. He has no understanding of service. Because he’s too busy serving himself again and again and again.’

‘This guy weakens our country to strengthen his own hands. He mocks our laws. He sows chaos and division among the people. And that’s to say nothing of the job he did as president,’ Walz argued.

Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach before entering politics, showcased his Midwestern roots as he told the ‘Packers and Badgers fans’ in the crowd that he once coached his team to a state championship and touted that he was the ‘top gun’ three years running at the trap shoot during his dozen years representing a mostly rural red-leaning district from southern Minnesota in Congress.

Hours earlier, Trump aimed to paint Harris and Walz as ultra-liberals as he called into Fox News’ ‘Fox and Friends’ for an interview.

‘You know, nobody knew how radical left she was, but he’s a smarter version of her, if you want to know the truth,’ Trump claimed in his Wednesday interview. ‘He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He’s probably more so than Bernie Sanders.’

And the former president argued that ‘this is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.’

Trump’s team was planning on painting the Democratic ticket as extreme left-leaning regardless of whom the vice president chose as her running mate, a source in Trump’s campaign told Fox News.

But Harris’ naming on Tuesday of Walz, a moderate congressman who shifted to a more progressive governor, over more moderate running mate finalists Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona seemed like a gift to Trump’s team.

‘I could not be more thrilled,’ Trump said regarding the choice of Walz as running mate. ‘I was shocked when, when it came down to the final two, that she didn’t pick Shapiro. I was very surprised.’

But the naming of a running mate has been lucrative for the Harris campaign, which highlighted that it had hauled in $36 million in fundraising in the 24 hours since the Walz announcement.

At the rally, Walz once again argued that Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio ‘are creepy and weird as hell.’

Vance, at a dueling campaign event just miles away, pushed back on the ‘weird’ label, saying he and Trump are ‘normal guys who want to make this country great.’

In a viral moment, Vance appeared to try and troll the vice president, as he approached Air Force Two at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport, where the senator’s campaign plane was also parked.

‘I figured that I would come by and get a good look at the plane because hopefully it’s going to be my plane in a few months,’ Vance said in front of Air Force Two. 

And once again pointing out that Harris has yet to sit for a major interview or hold a press conference in the two and a half weeks since she replaced Biden at the top of the Democrats’ national ticket, Vance told reporters, ‘I also thought you guys may get lonely, because the VP doesn’t answer questions from reporters.’

Vance also took aim at Walz, who served nearly a quarter-century in the National Guard, for what he claimed was ‘stolen valor,’ as the Trump campaign launched a full-frontal assault on the governor, accusing him of misrepresenting his rank, his service and charging he abandoned his unit on the eve of its deployment to Iraq.

The charge, if substantiated, could be explosive, as Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita well knows.

He was the mastermind 20 years ago behind the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ campaign that aimed to discredit Vietnam War veteran and Purple Heart recipient Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts ahead of his narrow 2004 presidential election loss to GOP incumbent George W. Bush.

But Vance himself never served in combat. While Vance was deployed to the war in Iraq as a Marine, he worked in the public affairs department while on his deployment.

And Trump over the years has faced well-documented allegations that as a young man he dodged the Vietnam War draft by claiming to have bone spurs in his feet, which sidetracked him from service.

It’s no surprise that Harris and Walz so far this week have held rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, with Vance holding events nearby to stay in close proximity.

The three states make up the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ that Democrats reliably won in presidential elections for nearly a quarter-century before Trump narrowly carried them in capturing the White House eight years ago.

But in 2020, Biden won back all three states with razor-thin margins as he defeated Trump, and the states remain extremely competitive as Harris and Trump face off in the 2024 presidential election.

The latest polls now show a margin-of-error race in the Blue Wall states, as well as in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, the other key battleground states.

Biden dropped his re-election bid on July 21, after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June prompted increased questions over whether the 81-year-old president had the physical and mental abilities to serve another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from fellow Democrats for Biden to end his re-election bid.

Harris didn’t mention her boss at a large rally in Atlanta last week, nor did she or Walz reference the president at their rally Tuesday night in Philadelphia.

But Harris, in her sixth visit to Wisconsin so far this year, praised the president at the top of her comments.

‘I want to bring greetings from our incredible president, Joe Biden,’ Harris said. ‘He loves Wisconsin, and I know we are all deeply grateful for his lifetime of service to our nation and for all he continues to do.’

After the crowd broke out in a chant of ‘Thank you, Joe! Thank you, Joe!’ the vice president responded, ‘That’s right. I’m gonna tell him what you said.’

Former President Trump said President Biden had ‘the right to run’ for re-election and the Democratic Party ‘took it away’ from him, while blasting his new opponent Kamala Harris as the ‘least admired, least respected, and worst vice president in the history of our country.’ 

Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday afternoon after holding off-the-record meetings with major media outlets. The Trump campaign said the Republican presidential nominee wanted to address the media ‘while they were already in Palm Beach because he’s the most transparent candidate in history.’ 

Trump said Thursday that the U.S. is in ‘the most dangerous period of time I’ve ever seen for our country.’ 

‘We have somebody that hasn’t received one vote for president, and she’s running, and that’s fine with me, but we were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else,’ Trump said. ‘I think, frankly, I’d rather be running against somebody else, but that was their choice.’ 

Trump said Harris is ‘a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen,’ and said her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is a ‘radical left man that has positions that are not even possible to believe they exist.’ 

‘He’s 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,’ Trump said. ‘He doesn’t mind people coming in from prisons and neither does she — I guess because she couldn’t care less.’ 

Harris formally became the nominee after Biden suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed her amid pressure from within the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee formally nominated Harris as their nominee this week. 

‘The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan,’ Trump said. ‘From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people are saying he lost after the debate and he couldn’t win.’ 

‘Whether he could win or he couldn’t, when he had the right to run, and they took it away, and they said they would use the 25th Amendment,’ Trump continued. 

Trump said the pressure from within the Democrat Party and ‘what they’ve done’ is ‘pretty incredible.’ 

‘Now I’m running against somebody else, and we’re leading. We’re leading — so I’m not complaining,’ he said. ‘I’m saying, for a country with a Constitution that we cherish — we cherish this Constitution — to have done it this way is pretty severe, pretty horrible.’ 

Trump said he thought Democrats ‘would have gone out to a vote’ or ‘would have had a primary system.’ 

‘But just to take it away from him like he was a child?’ Trump said, adding that Biden is ‘a very angry man right now.’ 

‘I can tell you that he’s not happy with Obama, and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi,’ Trump said. ‘He’s not happy with any of the people that told him ‘you’ve got to leave.’ He’s very unhappy, very angry.’ 

Trump said he thinks Biden ‘also blames’ Harris. 

‘He’s trying to put up a good face, but it is a very bad thing in terms of a country when you do that,’ Trump said. ‘I’m not a fan of his, as you probably have noticed, and he had a rough debate, but that doesn’t mean that you just take it away like that.’ 

He added: ‘You go out to a vote, you do something — he had 14 million votes. She had no votes.’ 

‘And she’s crashing,’ Trump said. 

‘We have a vice president who is the least admired, least respected, and the worst vice president in the history of our country. The most unpopular vice president,’ he said of Harris. 

Trump also slammed Harris for not engaging with the media. Harris has been the de facto Democratic nominee for 18 days, and she has not held a formal press conference or sat for a wide-ranging interview. 

‘She’s not doing any news conference. You know why she’s not doing it? Because she can’t do a news conference. She doesn’t know how to do a news conference,’ Trump said. ‘She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.’ 

Trump said he is ‘very happy to run against’ Harris, and said he ‘hates to be defending’ Biden, but pointed to the Constitution again. 

‘We have a Constitution. It’s a very important document, and we live by it. She has no votes, and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win,’ Trump said. ‘They said, ‘You’re not going to win.’ After the debate, they said, ‘You’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out.” 

Trump said Democrats, after successfully pressuring Biden to drop out of the race, ‘just picked a person.’ 

Trump, pointing to Harris’ failed 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, said she was ‘the first out.’ 

‘She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser when, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit, and she quit. She had no votes, no support, and she was a bad debater, by the way, a very bad debater,’ Trump said. ‘And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to. But she was a bad debater. She obviously did a bad job. She never made it to Iowa then, for some reason.’ 

Trump said he thinks Biden ‘regrets’ tapping Harris as vice president. 

‘He picked her and she turned on him, too. She was working with the people that wanted him out,’ he said. ‘But the fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system. In other words, you had 14 or 15 people. She was the first one out, and that you can then be picked to run for president.’ 

Trump added: ‘It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.’ 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a new interview with Time Magazine, apologized for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists happening on his watch, and warned that the country now faces a ‘full-fledged Iranian axis.’

Netanyahu had been prime minister for almost a year when Hamas terrorists launched the attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 people dead and hundreds more taken as hostages in Gaza. 

In an interview conducted on Aug. 4 at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, Time asked Netanyahu whether he would apologize for the Oct. 7 attack, noting his 17-year cumulative political career has been built on the argument that he is the best leader to ensure Israel’s safety.  

‘Apologize?’ Netanyahu asked. ‘Of course, of course. I am sorry, deeply, that something like this happened. And you always look back and you say, ‘Could we have done things that would have prevented it?’’

Ten months after what amounted to the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the Biden administration has increasingly grown frustrated with Netanyahu for failing to deliver a plan to end the war and get the more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas home. 

Israel now faces more fronts – in the north with Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the Gulf with the Houthis in Yemen – and now is bracing for an aerial assault from its main enemy, Iran. 

‘We’re facing not merely Hamas,’ Netanyahu told TIME. ‘We’re facing a full-fledged Iranian axis, and we understand that we have to organize ourselves for broader defense.’

According to a July poll by Israel’s most watched television station, 72% of Israelis believe Netanyahu should resign now or after the conflict ends. 

Critics, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war to further his own political ambition. 

‘Netanyahu is focused on his longevity in power more than the interests of the Israeli people or the State of Israel,’ Barak told Time. ‘It will take half a generation to repair the damage that Netanyahu has caused in the last year.’ 

Netanyahu argued that Israel must demolish every element of Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ in the region to ensure that Israel is never subjected to future massacres and that Hamas can no longer lay claim to Palestinian territories.

‘Being destroyed has bigger implications about Israel’s security,’ Netanyahu told Time, describing the war as existential. ‘I’d rather have bad press than a good obituary.’

Netanyahu delivered a speech to Congress in Washington, D.C., on July 25 to rally support from Israel’s closest ally, but nearly 130 Democrats and Vice President Harris declined to attend. 

‘I don’t think that the much-reported erosion of support among some quarters of the American public is related to Israel,’ Netanyahu told Time. 

‘It’s more related to America,’ he added, referencing a Harvard-Harris survey in January showing that 80% of respondents supported Israel, while 20% supported Hamas. 

‘There’s a problem that America has,’ Netanyahu said, noting a significant amount of support for a terrorist organization. ‘It’s not a problem that Israel has.’

The Biden administration and former President Trump have both expressed a desire for the war to end. Netanyahu has noted in the past that Israel did not start the war, but must be able to end it for its future security.

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Tel Aviv earlier this year, he reportedly told Netanyahu to bring the war to a close, because Israeli forces had already ensured that another Oct. 7 couldn’t happen again. Netanyahu reportedly replied that wasn’t his objective. Instead, he said, the goal was to ‘completely destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities.’

‘We’ve gone out of our way to enable humanitarian assistance since the beginning of the war,’ Netanyahu told Time, responding to allegations brought by Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi that the Israeli operations amounted to ‘collective punishment’ of civilians for Hamas’ actions. 

Time noted how Netanyahu embraced a policy over the past 10 years allowing Qatari funds to flow into Gaza after Hamas rose to power first through elections and later by force. It was meant as an incentive for Hamas to govern peacefully but instead financed miles of terror tunnels under civilian infrastructure. Also in January 2023, Netanyahu led government reforms that curbed judiciary powers, prompting large-scale protests. 

‘You are weakening us, and our enemy is going to see it, and we’re going to pay the price,’ former Minister of Defense Benny Gantz cautioned Netanyahu at the time. 

The prime minister placed blame on the protesters, many of whom said they would not serve in the Israeli military if the country’s democratic institutions were weakened. 

Netanyahu said his biggest mistake, however, was not going to war with Hamas in the past, listening to his security cabinet, which opposed such a move. For years, Israel’s strategy was to respond to Hamas’ attacks periodically by striking back and damaging them to the point of the terror group agreeing to a cease-fire that ultimately kept them in control of Gaza, with the ability to bolster their terror infrastructure that includes a complex network of underground tunnels.

Time reported that when Israel did go to war against Hamas for less than two months in 2014, Israeli officials said the security cabinet brought Netanyahu a plan to end the terror organization. The plan was predicted to lead to the deaths of approximately 10,000 Gazan civilians and 500 Israeli soldiers.

‘There was no domestic support for such an action,’ Netanyahu told Time regarding that plan. ‘There was certainly no international support for such an action – and you need both.’