Donald Trump wasn’t always so sour on Tim Walz.
The former president spoke glowingly of Walz’s response to riots in Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder in 2020—praise that Trump’s campaign tried to walk back on Wednesday.
“I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said in 2020, according to a call resurfaced in an ABC News report. “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim. You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast, it was like bowling pins.”
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Trump also referred to Walz—now arguably his biggest political foe alongside Kamala Harris—as an “excellent guy” on the call, ABC reported.
That’s a stark contrast to how Trump described Walz while phoning in to Fox News on Tuesday night. He told the network that Walz, a former school teacher and National Guard veteran, was a “communist” who is “probably about the same as Bernie Sanders.”
Trump’s team also pushed back on his four-year-old praise of Walz, with a spokesperson telling ABC that Trump only “lauded Walz” after he’d “heeded his advice to enlist support from the National Guard” amid the riots.
A spokesperson for Harris’ campaign told ABC that Walz did not call in the National Guard at Trump’s urging in 2020, despite the former president claiming otherwise.
Walz’s response to the civil unrest after Floyd’s murder has been a central attack by J.D. Vance and other Republicans this week, claiming the governor was largely to blame for the chaos and burning of buildings.
“He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” Vance said in a rally on Tuesday.
A Trump spokesperson took the heat a notch further, claiming that Trump’s old praise of the Walz was merely because he was happy that he was “FINALLY” doing something to deter rioters.
“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,” a Trump spokesperson told ABC. “In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, 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.”
