Donald Trump previously praised Tim Walz for his response to rioting in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, audio showed, even as Republicans continued to attack Kamala Harris’s running mate for his handling of such events and Trump claimed to have personally saved the Minnesota governor from rightwing protesters.
“What they did in Minneapolis was incredible,” Trump, then president, said in a White House phone call with Walz and other state leaders on 1 June 2020. “They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.”
ABC News and the Associated Press reported the call on Wednesday.
Floyd, who was Black, was killed in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, when a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe”, were captured on bystander video.
Protests ensued, against police brutality and for racial justice, eventually spreading around the world. Minneapolis also saw serious rioting, with businesses and a police station damaged. After three days, Walz mobilised the national guard.
In the current election campaign, Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and allies have criticised Walz’s response. In May, Trump told an audience in St Paul, Minnesota: “The entire city was burning down ... If you didn’t have me as president, you wouldn’t have Minneapolis today.”
Attacks on Walz have increased since Tuesday, when he was named as running mate to Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
“He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” JD Vance, the Ohio senator who is Trump’s running mate, said the same day.
On Wednesday, Trump added his own misleading claim to the mix, telling Fox News: “I helped him very much during the riots because his house was surrounded by people that were waving an American flag.”
Walz, Trump claimed, was “very, very concerned that [the situation] was going to get out of control … and he called me, I said, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ … He said, ‘You would put out the word that I’m a good person.’ And I did … I said, ‘He’s a good person. I hope everything’s good.’ And everybody … took the American flags and their Maga flags and they left.
“It was thousands of people … and he called me back and he thanked me very much. That’s my only thing I’ve ever had to do with him.”
Walz told Politico he and Trump had many calls in 2020. A source close to Walz told the Guardian the episode the former president described actually happened in April, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, after Trump posted incendiary tweets about state public health measures and more than a month before the George Floyd protests and riots.
In the call with governors on 1 June, the AP and ABC reported, Trump also told Walz, regarding the riots, “I don’t blame you. I blame the mayor”, a reference to Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis.
Trump added: “Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked [the rioters] out so fast, it was like bowling pins.”
That was of a piece with Trump’s incendiary tone in a 29 May tweet, in which he said: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts”, was a quote of Walter Headley, a hardline Miami police chief in the civil rights era. Twitter (now X) said Trump’s tweet violated rules “about glorifying violence” and limited its visibility.
Three days after Trump’s tweet, in the White House call, Trump also claimed to have told Walz, himself a national guardsman for 24 years: “You got to use the national guard in big numbers.”
On Wednesday, the Harris-Walz campaign told ABC that was not true.
In the call, Walz thanked Trump, Mark Esper, then secretary of defense, and Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff, for “strategic guidance”. They had been “very helpful”, the governor said, to a “city … grieving and in pain”.
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign attacked Walz again.
“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal mayor of Minneapolis,” said Karoline Leavitt, former assistant White House press secretary.
“In this daily briefing phone call with governors on 1 June, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for finally taking action to deploy the national guard to end the violence in the city.”
Audio of the call showed Trump said “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days”, and called Walz “an excellent guy”.
