At the Minnesota State Capitol, Tim Walz made a poignant announcement, declaring the end of his political journey. As he spoke, it seemed as though emotion might overtake him.

Following his speech, Walz quietly exited the stage without fielding questions, while his wife, Gwen, appeared visibly emotional, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

Perhaps their thoughts wandered to an alternate reality where Walz and Kamala Harris had claimed victory in the 2024 elections. Instead of residing in the Vice President’s abode at the US Naval Observatory, Walz now steps away from the political spotlight after what can only be described as one of the most tumultuous episodes in recent political history.

Adding to the uncertainty of his future, it remains unclear where Tim and Gwen Walz will settle following his departure from the governor’s office next January. Back in July 2019, Walz sold his personal residence for $304,000, opting for a state-provided residence, despite still owing $250,000 on the initial mortgage.

Ultimately, Walz’s political downfall can be attributed to the Minnesota welfare scandal, which has recently captured national attention with greater impact than his 2024 campaign ever did.

This past Monday, Walz officially withdrew from the gubernatorial race for a third term, taking responsibility for the fraud that occurred during his tenure, acknowledging, “the buck does stop with me.”

Walz conceded: ‘For the last several years, an organized group of criminals have sought to take advantage of our state’s generosity.’

However, when it came to his own downfall, he refused to take responsibility, instead blaming ‘conspiracy theorist right-wing YouTubers’ and the White House.

He accused President Trump of ‘demonizing our Somali neighbors,’ which was ‘disgusting and dangerous,’ he said.

The reaction from Republicans was mixed, with Walz’s demise being regarded as long overdue. However, he was also seen as one of the easiest and most useful political punching bags on the Democratic side.

Amid the ongoing scandal, Walz has been summoned to appear before a congressional committee on Wednesday, and the Trump administration called it ‘one of the largest frauds in American history and probably the largest theft of public welfare dollars’.

Federal charges have been filed against 98 people accused of embezzlement of public funds and, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, 85 of the defendants are ‘of Somali descent’. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in America.

Fifty-seven people, most of them Somali, have already been convicted in the scheme to divert $300 million in public grants intended to distribute free meals to children, according to prosecutors.

Those involved are accused of faking invoices, attendance records and meal deliveries, and spending the money on items including Lamborghinis, Porsches, and property in the Maldives.

Republicans accused Democrats in Minnesota of turning a blind eye to numerous warnings because the scandal involved the state’s Somali community, the largest in the country, with around 80,000 members.

The case first became public in 2022 but was injected into the national consciousness over the recent Christmas period after YouTuber Nick Shirley released a viral video focusing on day care centers in Minnesota.

That video was watched 127 million times on X and the Trump administration responded by surging fraud investigators to Minnesota and freezing federal child care payments to the state.

Walz has found himself at the center of the storm, and it is far from the first time.

From the moment Harris made the fateful decision to select him, the 61-year-old has been mired in gaffes and scandal. 

Harris’s aim was to appeal to Midwestern voters, with Walz touting his status as a gun owner and hunter.

However, when he invited the media to follow him on a pheasant hunt through long grass, it ended in farce.

Social media commentators accused Walz of ‘staging’ the event because other men with him had orange vests on but no guns.

Video showed him struggling to load his shotgun and he reportedly did not fire a single shot during the three-hour hunt.

While most politicians on a presidential ticket have a major controversy to deal with, he had at least half a dozen.

Perhaps the most damaging involved questions over why, as a national guardsman, he did not deploy to Iraq with his unit in 2006, having retired the year before.

But there were also accusations that he inflated his resume as a high school football coach.

In a huge embarrassment, Walz himself admitted ‘misspeaking’ after claiming to have been in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place in Beijing in 1989.

But he had been to communist China dozens of times, and a congressional investigation was launched into his links to the communist country.

In a further humiliation, Republicans nicknamed him ‘Tampon Tim’ for signing a 2023 law requiring that Minnesota schools provide menstruation supplies in boys’ restrooms.

His economic record in the state was quickly trashed, and his own financial competence was called into question.

Experts had been surprised when Harris picked him over the frontrunner, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and her aides indicated it was due to personal chemistry.

But Walz proceeded to engage awkwardly in public with Harris, and commentators described some of their early appearances together as stilted.

In one social media video he shared with Harris his recipe for ‘white guy tacos’.

Then, in his big moment, Walz was widely seen to have been outclassed by JD Vance, a younger man with much less political experience, in the vice presidential debate.

One influential pollster told the Daily Mail it was the moment Vance made his mark with the public, and Walz allowed him to do so.

Walz licked his wounds and returned to Minnesota, any dreams of running for the White House himself in 2028 dashed.

In retrospect, his downfall had begun the moment Democrats appeared to inflate his football coaching resume at the party’s Chicago convention in the summer of 2024.

The tale went that, in 1999, Walz had turned around Mankato West High School’s football team from 0-27 into state champions in an underdog triumph for the ages.

Players for the team were brought on stage and Amy Klobuchar, who ironically may now run to replace him as governor, told the crowd: ‘In Minnesota, we trust a coach who turned a team that was 0-27 into state champions.’

In fact, the head coach of the all-conquering side known as the ‘Scarlets’ was a man named Rick Sutton.

Walz, a social studies teacher, had been one of several assistant coaches under Sutton, working primarily with the defensive players.

Scrutiny then fell on Walz’s trips to China in the days when he was a teacher.

Of particular note was his claim to have been in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989 – the day when the Chinese authorities massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Speaking to a 2009 hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China to mark the 20-year anniversary of the massacre, Walz recalled his trip.

He said: ‘Twenty years ago today, I was in Hong Kong preparing to go to Foshan to teach. To watch what happened at the end of the day on June 4 was something that many of us will never forget, we pledge to never forget, and bearing witness and accurate telling of history is absolutely crucial for any nation to move forward.’

Walz made this claim on more than one occasion, but newspaper reports of the time place him nowhere near Hong Kong or China.

In an excruciating moment during the vice-presidential debate, watched by millions of voters, Walz conceded that he had ‘misspoken’ and said: ‘I’m a knucklehead at times.’

But perhaps more damaging to his reputation was the controversy over his military record.

Walz served 24 years in the Nebraska and Minnesota Army National Guard.

In a 2018 video advocating for stricter gun-control laws, he said: ‘We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.’

The phrase ‘that I carried in war’ was taken by many to suggest that Walz had served in a combat zone.

However, Walz was only ever deployed to Italy in 2003 to provide security at a US military base that was involved in supporting the ongoing Afghanistan war effort.

To address the matter, the Harris-Walz campaign issued a statement to say that Walz ‘misspoke’ – again.

But Walz himself seemed reluctant to admit a mistake.

In a joint CNN interview with Harris, he was asked to confirm that he had misspoken, but his answer appeared evasive.

‘My wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct,’ he said.

Meanwhile, he was lambasted by members of his own former unit for his decision to retire from the National Guard shortly before they were deployed to Iraq in 2005.

Vance, who served with the US Marines in Iraq, called that decision ‘absolutely shameful’.

It also emerged that Walz, in campaign literature for a 2006 bid to represent Minnesota in the House of Representatives, was described as a ‘retired command sergeant major’.

The same description was used on the Harris-Walz website in 2024.

However, even though Walz did briefly serve as a command sergeant major, he did not keep that title after retirement.

Instead, he retired as a lower-ranking ‘master sergeant’, having never completed the coursework required to retain the more senior title.

The mother of Kye Miller, a Minnesotan who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on June 29, 2006, slammed Walz at the time.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘To publicly present false prestige of his unearned rank, an inaccurate representation, is a falsehood of who he truly is.’

The Harris-Walz campaign was forced to edit its website to correct the mistake.

It was far from the first scandal Walz had been through.

Before his political career, when he was a teacher, he was stopped by police while driving at 96mph in a 55mph zone near Chadron, Nebraska.

A blood test showed his alcohol level was above the state’s legal limit, and his lawyer admitted in court that he had been drinking.

He pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless driving, lost his license for 90 days, and paid a fine of $200.

A decade later, when he ran for Congress, the incident emerged and his team claimed that he had not been drinking.

‘The DUI charge was dropped for a reason: it wasn’t true,’ his team said.

They claimed that Walz had only failed a sobriety test because of hearing loss he incurred while serving in the National Guard – and that he had been allowed to drive himself to jail.

The full truth later emerged – that he had been drinking and was driven to the police station in the back of a police car.

Having survived such a litany of scandals, Walz came within reach of the office of vice president.

On Monday, as he announced he would not run for Minnesota governor again, he said he had ‘zero sadness and zero regret’.

Like some of his other statements, that one was a little hard to believe.