# Herschel Walker **Herschel Walker** (born March 3, 1962, Augusta, Georgia) is a Heisman-winning former running back, [[Donald Trump]]'s hand-picked 2022 Senate candidate in Georgia, and — since late 2025 — U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas. His relationship with Trump predates politics by four decades: Trump bought the USFL's New Jersey Generals after Walker's first season there. He matters to this vault as the clearest case study in the **candidate-quality problem** of the 2022 midterms — a Trump-recruited celebrity with no political record who won his primary by 68% and then lost the one Senate seat Republicans most expected to flip — and as an example of the second Trump administration rewarding loyal losers with ambassadorships. ## Football and the Trump connection - University of Georgia, 1980–1982; won the 1982 Heisman Trophy and left before graduating. - USFL New Jersey Generals, 1983–1985 (league MVP 1985). Oklahoma oilman J. Walter Duncan sold the team to Trump after the 1983 season, making Trump Walker's employer. - NFL, 1986–1997: Dallas, Minnesota (the 1989 trade to the Vikings is often called one of the most lopsided in league history), Philadelphia, the New York Giants, and Dallas again. Two Pro Bowls. ## Trump loyalist - Backed Trump in 2016 and 2020 and spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention. - Appointed by Trump to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition in 2018, reappointed December 2020; removed by President Biden in March 2022 after declining a request to resign. - Trump urged him to run for Senate in Georgia; he announced in August 2021. ## The 2022 Georgia Senate race **The result.** Walker won the Republican primary with 68%, then trailed incumbent Democrat [[Raphael Warnock]] 48.5% to 49.4% on November 8, 2022 (Libertarian Chase Oliver took 2.1%, forcing a runoff). Warnock won the December 6, 2022 runoff 51.4% to 48.6%. It was the last Senate race of the cycle and gave Democrats a 51-seat majority. See [[2022 Midterm Elections]]. **What sank the campaign** (as reported in 2022 and summarized in Wikipedia's sourcing): - **Abortion.** Walker ran as an opponent of abortion. In October 2022 the Daily Beast reported that a woman said he paid for her 2009 abortion; the New York Times corroborated parts of her account, and a family-court record confirmed they had a son born in 2012. A second woman alleged he had pressured her into a 1993 abortion. Walker denied both: "I never asked anyone to get an abortion. I never paid for an abortion." - **Residency.** He registered to vote in August 2021 at an Atlanta property owned by his wife, but said in January 2022 "I live in Texas," and tax records listed his primary residence in Tarrant County, Texas, for 2021 and 2022 — see [[Tarrant County Political Ecosystem]]. - **Inflated résumé.** His food-services company, touted as having $70 million in sales and 600+ employees, told the government in 2020 it had eight employees; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found his claims of law-enforcement work false or unverifiable; his campaign falsely claimed he had graduated from Georgia. - **Family and personal history.** He acknowledged additional children only in June 2022, after reporting; his adult son publicly accused him of threats and abandonment in October 2022; police reports from 2001–2012 described threats against former partners. Walker has publicly attributed past violent behavior to dissociative identity disorder, which he wrote about in his 2008 book *Breaking Free*. ## Ambassador to the Bahamas - Trump named him as his nominee on December 17, 2024. - Confirmed by the Senate **51–47 on October 7, 2025**, on party lines, in a package with more than 100 other nominees (NBC News). - Presented credentials on December 9, 2025. He is the first Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas since Nicole Avant left the post in 2011; the embassy had been run by chargés d'affaires in between. His September 2025 hearing focused on drug trafficking and Chinese influence in the Caribbean. ## Analytical note Walker's arc — celebrity recruited on Trump's say-so, primary won on name recognition, general election lost on vetting failures, then rewarded with a diplomatic post — is a compact version of how the Trump-era party trades the institutional function of candidate screening for loyalty. The 2022 Georgia loss was decided by less than three points in the same election in which [[Brian Kemp]] and the rest of the Republican statewide ticket held their offices (WABE). ## Footnote: the Schlapp case The Republican operative who sued CPAC chairman [[Matt Schlapp]] in January 2023 alleged the incident happened in October 2022 while he was working on Walker's Senate campaign. ## See Also - [[Donald Trump]] · [[Raphael Warnock]] · [[2022 Midterm Elections]] · [[Second Trump Administration]]