A former professional football player, Herschel Walker, who once described vampires as “cool people,” is facing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday after President Trump nominated him to serve as the next American ambassador to the Bahamas.

Mr. Walker, a Heisman Trophy winner, is perhaps best known for his gaffe-filled 2022 Senate campaign in Georgia when he was defeated by Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and publicly mocked by President Obama.

Mr. Trump, who was out of office at the time, endorsed Mr. Walker in the Georgia Senate race but his campaign was plagued by bizarre public statements and scandals — including an attack on his character from his own son.

Mr. Walker’s comments about vampires and werewolves during a campaign event on November 16, 2022, drew significant attention.

“I was watching this movie called ‘Fright Night,'” Mr. Walker told supporters. “It was about vampires. I don’t know if you know, vampires are cool people, are they not? But I want to tell you something that I found out. A werewolf can kill a vampire, did you know that? I didn’t know that. So, I don’t want to be a vampire anymore, I wanted to be a werewolf.”

Mr. Obama, campaigning for Reverend Warnock, mocked Mr. Walker’s comments.

“Mr. Walker has been talking about issues that are of great importance to the people of Georgia. Like whether it is better to be a vampire or a werewolf,” Mr. Obama said.

“This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself,” Mr. Obama added. “When I was 7.”

Mr. Walker also raised eyebrows when he appeared to question whether a border wall — a key policy of Mr. Trump’s — would actually work during comments on November 29, 2022.

“A wall do work,” Mr. Walker said. “When you got a wall around your house, people don’t … yeah, but they can get in. But, you know what? If they get in, it would be hard to get out because I got a dog that … well, my dog really won’t bite, but he’s pretty bad anyway.”

A number of Mr. Walker’s previous comments also resurfaced during the 2022 midterms, including remarks made in 2019 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the state of Washington during which he blamed his wife’s “awful genes” for his son, Christian Walker, being an “ugly baby.”

“I don’t know if y’all know this, but I knew Donald before he became ‘The Donald,’” Mr. Walker said during the same 2019 address. “Matter of fact, little Ivanka and little Donald lived with me for a week, for five years, during the summer. Every amusement park, Disney World, Sea World — every place they went, I was the one to take them.” 

“I kept them for a week, so the intelligence of those two kids right there — not from Donald,” Mr. Walker said.

Mr. Walker was widely criticized for falsely claiming to be an FBI agent in 2019. He had done a week’s training at Quantico, Virginia. In 2017, Mr. Walker had claimed to be an honorary deputy at the Cobb County Police Department in Georgia but the department told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2022 that it had no record of him working there.

During an October 2022 debate with Reverend Warnock, Mr. Walker displayed what he claimed was a police badge.

“This is from my hometown. This is from Johnson County from the sheriff from Johnson County, which is a legit badge,” Mr. Walker said.

Mr. Walker was reportedly in the habit of showing off a badge indicating he had been made an honorary deputy in Cobb County some time after 2004 but this did not confer powers of arrest.

Separately during the 2022 campaign, a woman alleged that Mr. Walker had paid for an abortion in 2009. She later became the mother of one of Mr. Walker’s children. He denied any knowledge of the abortion but acknowledged that he may have written her a check and sent her a get well card for other reasons.

Another woman, represented by attorney Gloria Allred, alleged that Mr. Walker had pressured her into getting an abortion in 1993 after a yearslong extramarital affair. <r/ Walker denied the allegation.

Mr. Walker’s son, Christian Walker — the “ugly baby” — launched a stinging attack on his father in a tweet in October 2022.

“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” Christian Walker wrote. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”

Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Walker to serve as ambassador to the Bahamas in December last year but he will need to convince a majority of senators to back him. It remains to be seen if Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations committee will balk at his previous statements.