It sounds like the ultimate endorsement of the job Kamala Harris’ running mate did as governor of Minnesota: leaked audio of a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Gov. Tim Walz, in the midst of the George Floyd riots, praising Walz for the job he was doing.
And while the Harris-Walz campaign is touting it, there’s one thing they won’t tell you: It’s been edited so dramatically that the initial meaning of the former president’s words has been entirely changed.
In case you haven’t seen or heard it, this is the audio that the Harris-Walz campaign has been flogging since Walz was picked, with Trump allegedly saying he was “very happy” with the job Walz was doing.
Unearthed audio: Trump tells Tim Walz in 2020 he is “very happy” with his handling of George Floyd protests: “I fully agree with the way he handled it… [Tim Walz is an] excellent guy”
(Trump is now trying to criticize Walz over the same issue) pic.twitter.com/5Ii1EhBZo4
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 7, 2024
The audio is, of course, meant to counter the assertion that Walz was the Nero of Minneapolis, fiddling away at the governor’s residence in St. Paul while police stations and Target stores burned in the city where Floyd died.
Media were quite eager to pick up this story, without really bothering to see if the claim was true.
Here’s a smattering of headlines, for example. ABC News: “Despite new criticism, Trump told Walz in 2020 he was ‘very happy’ with his handling of George Floyd protests.” The Associated Press: “Trump praised Minnesota Gov. Walz in 2020 for response to unrest over Floyd’s murder, audio shows.” CBS News: “Uncovered audio of Trump praising Walz contradicts criticisms of riot response.”
There was only the slightest caveat added to this reporting, which foregrounded the Harris campaign’s claim as if it were gospel fact. Take ABC’s qualification: “Trump also suggested on the call that it was his encouragement that sparked Walz to call in the National Guard: ‘I said, you got to use the National Guard in big numbers,’ Trump said. A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said Wednesday that was untrue.”
“Gov. 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 spokeswoman for the Trump campaign said at the time.
“In this daily briefing phone call with governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Gov. Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city.”
Most outlets, however, gave the impression they were waiving away the Trump campaign’s claims as unfounded. Note ABC News’ next sentence after that quote explaining the context of the clip: “Trump’s contemporaneous approval of Walz’s decision-making in the wake of George Floyd’s murder undermines one of Republicans’ most vocal lines of attack against the vice presidential nominee.”
It doesn’t, however. Why? Because what the Trump campaign was saying about the clip was exactly what he actually said.
First, the version of the clip being pushed by the Kamala campaign: “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. I asked him to do that, and the whole world was laughing — two days, three days later, I spoke to the governor, I think, on the call, and he’s an excellent guy.”
As Megyn Kelly noted on her Sirius XM show last week, however, this wasn’t the full clip in context.
“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. I asked him to do that — and a lot of men, we have all the men and women that you need,” Trump said. “But people aren’t calling them up. You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.” [Emphasis ours.]
“They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. And the whole world was laughing.” [Emphasis again ours.]
But wait, there’s more: “I said you’ve got to use the National Guard in big numbers. They didn’t at first, then they did, and I’ll tell you that — I don’t know, what was it, governor? It was the third night, fourth night — those guys walk through that stuff like it was butter. They walked right through, and you haven’t had any problems.” [Emphasis, in case you haven’t caught on, again ours.]
That italicized part is just a little important — and totally missing from the Harris-Walz campaign’s version of the clip. He’s very clearly saying that Tim Walz is only doing a good job controlling the Floyd riots because he’s finally taking suggestions from the White House regarding a show of force. Too late to save Minneapolis, too late to save it from metastasizing to the rest of the country, but perhaps in enough time to keep the city from becoming a post-riot wasteland.
Then there was another clip released by the Harris campaign in which Trump said he was “very happy with the last couple of days, Tim. You called up big numbers [of National Guard troops], and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”
“Uh, yeah, our city is grieving and in pain,” Walz responded.
The full version of Trump’s remarks, dropped stuff again in italics: “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins. Is Tim there? Because I’d like to maybe have him explain the difference between the beginning and the end. Are you there?”
Walz responded that he was and thanked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley for “strategic guidance.” He then used his National Guard experience to talk about his reservations about bringing troops in to restore order.
“One thing I would say is a lot of people don’t understand who the National Guard is, and you need to get out there from a PR perspective and make sure that it’s not seen as an occupying force, but it’s their neighbors — school teachers, business owners, those types of things.”
While Trump said he thought this was “a good idea,” he noted, “It got so bad a few nights ago that the people wouldn’t have minded an occupying force.
“I wish we had an occupying force in there, but for some reason — I don’t know what it is — governors don’t like calling up a lot of the Guard. We have thousands and thousands of people waiting to be called up — is that a correct statement, general?” Trump said, addressing Milley. Milley responded that there were 350,000 guardsmen ready to go.
“We have 350,000 people, and they call up 200,” Trump said. “Tim did that the first night, which wasn’t successful. What happened is, after that, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ And I’ll tell you, it was like magic.”
Again, everything after the city being in pain wasn’t being mentioned by either the Harris-Walz campaign or the media — and it proved that, far from cosigning Walz’s strategy for dealing with the protesters, Trump was taking him to task for not heeding the White House’s advice earlier.
CLAIM:
- Trump praised Gov. Walz for his handing of the 2020 riots, as shown in an audio clip.
CONCLUSION:
- The full clip actually showed that Trump went on to berate Walz for his mishandling of the situation.
This isn’t just a minor quibble. Walz’s hesitancy to respond to the unrest in Minneapolis even after Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey — not exactly an Eric Adams-esque hard-on-crime big-city politician himself — called on him to deploy the National Guard to protect first responders who were being attacked by rioters as they tried to put out fires.
At 6:30 p.m. on May 27, 2020, Frey openly called upon Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard, The Wall Street Journal reported. A written request was issued at 9:11 p.m. that night.
It wasn’t until May 28 at 4 p.m. that Walz sent in a measly 500 guardsmen. “In the interim, his staff had quizzed the Guard about its members’ DEI training and whether they had experience working with ‘diverse communities,’ according to a report by a Minnesota Senate committee,” the Journal noted.
On May 30, he activated the whole of the Minnesota National Guard, and by May 31, 5,000 soldiers were in the city restoring order. This call took place the day afterwards.
Trump clearly wasn’t happy with how Walz had responded, nor would he normally approve of such tactics. The then-president was only happy that the governor had finally ceded to reality and employed force majeure against the rioters. Anything else simply doesn’t pass muster as factual.
