Trump and Walz tell different tales about conversations during 2020 unrest

Former President Donald Trump and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the new Democratic vice presidential nominee, have different stories about the 2020 Minneapolis unrest that brought rioters to the governor’s house.

Walz framed his story as Trump aggravating rioters into coming to his house while the former president suggested he saved the governor. Their stories have reentered the national conversation after Trump criticized Walz for his handling of the George Floyd riots, even though unearthed audio shows he praised the governor in 2020, saying he’s “an excellent guy.”

The former president said Wednesday on Fox News’s Fox & Friends that Walz asked him to tell pro-Trump protesters outside the governor’s house that he was “a good person.”

“And I did. I put out the word. I said, ‘He’s a good person. I hope everything’s good.’ And everybody put down their flags and took their flags with them, but they took the American flags and their MAGA flags, and they left,” Trump said. “He called me back, and he thanked me very much.”

Protesters gathered in front of the governor’s mansion in Minneapolis in April 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The same day, Trump tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

In a September 2021 interview with Politico, Walz argued that the tweet “brought armed people to my house.”

“It certainly ratcheted up the social media side of things and put the security folks a little more on high alert, but not all that much,” he added.

Walz had decided to call Trump to confront him about the armed protesters, but he never got a response as to why the former president had decided to tweet the words.

“And it wasn’t facetious when I asked him — this was in April of 2020, it was pre-George Floyd,” Walz said. “And that tweet specifically came around lockdowns, hospitalizations, things like that, and I was legitimately asking, what could we do differently.”

Walz had endured protesters at his door for several months after Trump’s tweet, the Floyd riots, and the Jan. 6 Capitol storming. Walz’s son had to be evacuated from his residence and taken to an off-site location during the latter event.

Walz and Trump’s different recallings of what happened during that April day may be an integral part of their respective campaigns’ messaging against each other.