Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has said he was not surprised by Donald Trump’s reaction to being called out for not lowering U.S. flags to half-staff after the murder of a Democratic politician.
Melissa Hortman, a leading member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was shot dead in her Brooklyn Park home in June by a man impersonating a police officer. Her husband was also shot dead.
Hortman was later found to be on a list of Democrats to be targeted by 57-year-old Trump supporter Vance Boelter, who was been charged with their murder.
The president was asked in the Oval Office on Tuesday when U.S. flags were not lowered in the wake of the politically motivated attack. A reporter pointed out that flags were lowered after MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University in Orem last week, but not after Hortman and her husband were murdered.
“Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that, but the governor of Minnesota didn’t ask me,” Trump said, refusing to mention Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate last year, by name. Walz said on Tuesday he would be seeking a third term as governor next year.
Reacting to Trump’s comments on MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Walz said that Hortman’s death had been “reduced to a footnote.”
“It’s been pretty traumatic in Minnesota,” Walz told Psaki. “Nothing surprises me. There’s no compassion. There’s no empathy in this man, and there’s no sense of, of governing for the whole country. We had a horrific act of political violence and the loss of an exceptional human being, a mom. Just, just it’s hard to explain to people. And it gets reduced to a footnote. This beautiful life, this big life.”
He said that “disrespect rolled off” Trump’s tongue. “Yet we’re supposed to believe that they’re definitely concerned about political violence. And you see the vice president, you know, go on a podcast, It’s government by podcast, to just lie, and to bring hate. And they’re not interested in solving this.”
Walz was referring to JD Vance standing in to host Kirk’s podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. During the two-hour show, the vice president paid tribute to his friend and blamed the left for his death.
Vance angrily claimed it was a fact that “most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
Trump has struck a similar tone, railing against the “radical” left. His strong reaction, and that of the right generally, has stoked fears that his administration is trying to harness outrage over the killing to suppress political opposition.
Walz brought up a shooting attack on pupils as they were praying at a church in Minneapolis in August. Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were killed. The governor said he would bet that Trump doesn’t even know the names of these children.
“Two weekends in a row. We’ve gone to memorial services for an 8- and 10-year-old, to hear about these beautiful lives. And I guarantee you, Donald Trump doesn’t know their names—and he’s out there doing this,” he said.
“He doesn’t care. I actually believe if there had been students shot at that event [Kirk’s Utah event], I don’t know what he would have done because apparently this is, as the vice president said, a fact of life. Well, we’re done with it in Minnesota. We’re going to do something about it.”
Walz spokesperson Claire Lancaster told the AP on Monday night that “Governor Walz wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans.”
In the aftermath of the attack that killed the Hortmans, Trump spoke out to condemn political violence, but soon returned to shading Walz. “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump, however, also refused to call Walz to offer condolences, saying it would only “waste time.”
“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked-out. I’m not calling,” Trump told reporters. “Why would I call him?”
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