Herschel Walker and the GOP's Trump Candidate Problem

Even out of office, the former president is dragging down his party

My new piece in TIME is a look at the Senate landscape, starting with a Herschel Walker campaign stop in McDonough, Georgia:

Some U.S. senators give windy, pompous speeches, dense with policy and argument. No one need worry that Herschel Walker would be that kind of U.S. senator. “They told me I had a mental problem,” Walker says, two big hands resting on a wooden lectern. “I go to the hospital, I go, ‘Whoa, these people here are crazy, I’m not like them!’ But then I realized I was exactly like they were.”

It’s a bright morning in McDonough, a quaint little town on the outskirts of Atlanta, and the sports hero-turned-candidate is recounting how, two decades ago, he underwent psychiatric hospitalization to deal with his “alters,” the multiple personalities that had been behind his years of erratic and violent behavior, including repeatedly threatening his then-wife with guns and knives. It’s supposed to be a story about buried trauma and not being afraid to ask for help. But Walker suddenly gets off on a tangent about book publishing, another topic to which his audience, about 60 of the local Republican faithful, may or may not be able to relate. “What you do is, you look around and make sure that there’s no there’s no writer putting his book out at that time,” Walker says. “You wait till there’s no one putting their book out that week, that’s when you put your book out.”

But Walker isn’t the only candidate this cycle who owes his place on the ballot to Donald Trump. In several of this year’s most competitive Senate races, Trump endorsed political newcomers with unconventional profiles who now are struggling: Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona. It’s enough to make the GOP establishment grumble that the former president may be to blame if his party fails to take back the Senate under otherwise favorable conditions.

Also, has anyone else noticed this about Walker’s ad “addressing” the scandals?

In a new ad aimed at putting the issue to rest, Walker addresses the camera directly: “As everyone knows, I had a real battle with mental health—even wrote a book about it,” he says. “And by the grace of god, I’ve overcome it.” Taken literally, he seems to be saying he battled and defeated his own mental health, which would certainly explain things.

Read all the way to the end for a Tommy Tuberville joke too good to spoil. Here’s the piece.