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The president of the United States was thundering away on Twitter and Tim Walz was one of his targets.
“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” raged Donald Trump.
Walz was in his second year as governor of Minnesota when the Covid-19 pandemic struck; like most governors, he imposed strict public health policies to contain the spread of the virus. And when Trump goaded on angry protestors who were targeting Walz and other governors, Walz found himself under siege. Trump’s broadside, Walz said, “brought armed people to my house.”
And so he decided to confront Trump in a private phone call.
Walz, now the Democratic nominee for vice president, told us about his contentious conversation with Trump in an interview for our 2022 book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future. We interviewed him in September of 2021, and Walz spoke in depth about his interactions with Trump, managing the chaos of the pandemic and handling mass demonstrations and public disorder after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Only a few paragraphs of that interview made it into our book. With Walz’s rise as a national figure, we wanted to share much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, with help from Anusha Mathur.
Tell us about your interactions as a Democratic governor with President Trump. You served in the Congress and were a fairly bipartisan member of Congress. What sticks out from your experiences dealing with President Trump last year, whether on Covid, on the protests or whatever.
I had the privilege of working with President Trump, with President Obama, with President Bush and many different members of Congress. President Trump was certainly the most unorthodox. The fact of the matter is — this is a “speaking next to the elephant” thing when you’re a governor — a president can have an immense impact on what [people] say and do. And, watching it in real time, just a tweet like “Liberate Michigan,” people forget that also included “Liberate Minnesota,” and Virginia.
What was the impact of that on you and your state?
It 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.
My relationship was based on pragmatism, understanding that it was very clear that President Trump was going to do what President Trump is going to do. And that many times what he was saying, you need to make sure you verify what was actually going to come out of that. So I took an approach that there was absolutely zero upside to engaging, rather than just trying to figure out “OK this is going to happen, how do we respond afterwards.” I think that sums up how I approach this.
And I’ll just be candid, serving in Congress, knowing what the capabilities of the federal government were, and the shortcomings — the Covid thing really struck me the last week of February. I remember telling my wife, just watching it on the news, that Japan had closed all their schools. I remember just being stunned and stood in place and I went back and listened to it again. And I remember saying “Oh my God.” I had dealt with the SARS epidemic, living and traveling in China, and then two days later when the president downplayed it, it became very apparent when he said it was going to be over, I said, “Well, Japan knows that’s not true and so do we.”
And so it was at that point that I started asking our team to reassess the thing we believed to be true and what was going to happen, and what really struck me was you were truly on your own.
We had the advantage of having, not just the Mayo Clinic but global companies like Ecolab and Medtronic and 3M, masking, ventilators, all of that. They started making it clear that they did not believe we had a strategic national stockpile before the pandemic. It was really the first time certainly in my political career and possibly my whole adult life that I did not feel you can count on the federal government for help.
To drill down a little further on what you said, after Trump’s “liberate” tweet, armed people came to your house?
Yes, and these Proud Boys, some of the leaders that were here have been documented.
We have our residences in a residential neighborhood over the last few years. And certainly with George Floyd and other stuff, folks started taking to protesting here. And I got a great team and the State Patrol does an incredible job, but on Jan. 6, when the Capitol riot happened we had that too, and there were, of course, legislators as well as some of these elements that believe the election was stolen, marched on the residence, and that’s the one where it got way out of hand. The state patrol had to evacuate my 14-year-old, find the dog, take him to an off-site location.
Just to be very candid, the rhetoric that the president engaged in, and then was amplified by others, changed the whole dynamic especially in a state like Minnesota where I could be out by myself without folks around and it would be fine. That was a little different at that point in time. And that was the implication there certainly not to the level that you saw with Gov. [Gretchen] Whitmer, or some of the other things, but it did stir an element of folks here that hadn’t done that before.
This is a recurring theme with a lot of governors. Just to clarify, on Jan. 6, your son was over in the residence and had to be evacuated.
Correct. He was taken to a secure location.
And were you ever moved for your own security?
On that day we moved to another location. And other than that, there have been times that they’ve upped the presence, certainly during the civil unrest of May and June of 2020, there was more [security] because of just the sheer numbers.
Did you ever tell the president or Mike Pence or anybody in the White House, “Guys, this is really, really unhealthy what you’re saying and doing and you’re creating real problems here in states like this”?
Yes. Yes, to both. I think I explained it exactly like that, and I will say this, President Trump would call me and we would speak and in those conversations they were relatively cordial. He made public statements, during the unrest with George Floyd, that “Gov. Walz knows how to do this, he’d been in the military. And they’re doing some of these things.”
But I also would tell him that it was really unhelpful and that my children were scared when they heard these things. And it wasn’t that he had to agree with where I was at, but I asked for clarification. I never got it. I said “What does ‘Liberate Minnesota’ mean? What do you want me to do differently? What do you think that I’m doing or not doing?”
This is during George Floyd?
That and during Covid. My relationship was much closer with Vice President Pence. We served together [in the House], and I would say we had even a cordial relationship. We spoke often. The vice president knew my family, knew them by name, and I would make the case, seemed much more actually engaged in this. And certainly the vice president never, never tweeted anything like that. But he did not tweet anything against it either.
Governor, when you would say, Mr. President, my children are scared, what would his response be to do that?
The president’s communication style was that I sometimes wondered if he actually heard me.
There was actually one time where I said my daughter is sitting right next to me, Mr. President, could she say hi? And what I was trying to do is for him to maybe engage on a personal basis with that. [My children] both had to get off social media because they get threats, we have people directly threatening them.
I said that there are real-world implications. I said I know that you care deeply about your children, I care deeply about mine, anything we could do to maybe separate that stuff. I never got a direct answer, but I think he heard. And he, I will say this, he took the time to speak with her, and he spent a little time chatting on the phone. That’s the way I approach this. I was trying to humanize this, trying to make the case that we’re all in this together.
It sounds like you wrestled with something that a lot of members of Congress and governors did, which is how to distinguish between Trump’s bark and bite. Is he just kind of a BS artist or no, this guy is a real demagogue who was a direct threat to American democracy? Was it hard at times for you to sort of figure out which side of the ledger he was on?
I think it’s always hard when it’s personal. It’s much easier if it’s just theoretical, you don’t know them. This happens to all of us. I like to make the case that people don’t like me until they meet me. I’m pretty sure the president thinks that of everything and to be very honest he was often quite cordial with me. But I still don’t know to this day. I think those around him probably do, and I’m certain he probably does know the impact he made on those that were listening.
When you say to the president, “What do you mean liberate Minnesota” what was his response to that?
I never got a response.
I just asked, and I said I just really, really wanted to clarify exactly what you mean. I did not jump to the conclusion on that. And it wasn’t facetious when I asked him — this was in April of 2020, it was pre-George Floyd. And that tweet specifically came around lockdowns, hospitalizations, things like that, and I was legitimately asking, what could we do differently.
At that point, I’m asking what would you do differently and asking for help, and I never got a response. And I called the White House, and left a message and I asked, kindly if not the president, someone could call. And he tweeted two words “Liberate Minnesota.” I think the silence from that tells us all what we suspect. And that became pretty tough because it was a tough summer, we were headed into the early peak then.
Governor, we have heard from several of your gubernatorial colleagues that after the fallout from George Floyd’s death you gave them advice on how to manage Trump’s sort of militancy and what to do with their National Guard, how to deal with it when then-Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf or whoever comes to town. Can you just give us a flavor of that advice?
I think you guys have probably pieced together some of the stuff that came out with the Joint Chiefs and the Defense secretary and some of the redacted comments, we were on the other end of some of those, and it just became very clear to me that there was, let’s just say there was disagreement in the White House on how to handle the civil unrest. The desire to step beyond the Insurrection Act, and there were those that knew the danger of that. And the irony of this is that when President Bush rescinded the Insurrection Act, I was the lead author, as a member of Congress to put it back in. I knew clearly what the role of the National Guard was.
I just made it very clear to them that in these situations they escalate very quickly and maybe, we hadn’t seen it in 15 years probably, that it was critically important that civilian leadership was seen as leading this, and that the face forward needed to look like your state, it needed to be the National Guard, it needed to be those local folk. Because no secret about it, now we’re seeing in the aftermath of Gen. [Mark] Milley’s statements and things like that, there was very close to a movement to use federal forces on U.S. soil and I explained clearly to the president that the vast majority of the people out there protesting were protesting a murder they saw in front of them, and to do anything to exacerbate their anger was going to make the situation worse.
So I was very clear with other governors, very clear what would happen if you saw this unrest in your cities, and that if there was an opening, perhaps for the federal government to send in more [troops] because the interesting thing was we received incredible support and help. Gen. Milley and the Defense secretary spent a significant time with us talking about everything from strategy, both on the political strategy to actual physical use of the troops we had on the ground and what they needed. And it was clear to me at that point in time that there was a struggle going on to handle civil unrest with civilian authority versus military.
The transition from Trump to Biden. Tell us about your experiences with the Biden administration so far. And have you spoken with President Biden, have you spoken with Vice President Harris?
I have not spoken with Vice President Harris personally. I’ve spoken obviously with President Biden, with a lot of his team. Obviously, the relief was there that, especially at the time they came in with Covid spiking again after the winter spike and then kind of dreading what spring was bringing, there was a lot of communication there. They have, and this is to their credit, they have been working really hard to make sure that Republican governors were heard.
Obviously, there’s this discussion about defunding the police, which the right likes to focus on when it comes to Democrats. Are you worried at all that this effort in Minneapolis to rein in the police department could give fodder to the right to portray Democrats in the midterms as anti-cop? And if so, have you ever expressed that concern to anybody in the party?
Yeah. In fact, publicly I came out last week, we have a charter vote coming up that is due to reform the police. I think we’re already doing that. Our Minnesota Department of Human Rights, we’ve made massive changes from barring chokeholds to reporting our standards and licensing board. But I’m worried about the simple message that was put out early and the complexity of talking about redoing public safety to include mental health professionals who should be there.
Republicans are very good at latching on to those things. They’ve obviously got no plan and what I worry most about is, there’s legitimate concerns across this country of rising crime rates. I don’t know and I am very careful about not using anecdotal evidence, but I just think coming out of the pandemic, we’re a little less tolerant.
But yes I certainly do, and I’ve expressed that concern that I certainly support reformative beliefs but I certainly believe the police department’s going to be part of the solution, and to try and help people.
Have you conveyed your concern to anybody in the national party at all?
I have not to the national — [but] I’ve made it very clear. I was in the news about this last week. And just to be candid, the left’s not happy about that. This is much more complex. We do need to rethink how we do public safety, but we also need to have a candid conversation about crime rates going up.
