Tim Walz says Trump ‘brings out the worst in people – and the worst in me’

Donald Trump “brings out the worst in people, and he brings out the worst in me”, Tim Walz has said in a new interview in which Minnesota’s governor struck an apologetic tone over a recent plea for his fellow Democrats to “bully the shit out of” the Republican president.

Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate as she unsuccessfully ran for the White House against Trump in November, made those comments in a conversation with the Minnesota news station KMSP that was published Thursday.

They came after Walz in late May urged his fellow Democrats “to be a little meaner … a little more fierce” to Trump – and “bully the shit out of him back” – as the party tried to regroup from its defeat to him in the fall.

About two weeks later, on 14 June, an assassin fatally shot former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their home in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, investigators say. Police say the assassin also wounded Democratic state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home in nearby Champlin before surrendering to authorities the night of 15 June.

KMSP’s conversation with Walz was billed as the first television interview the governor had given since Hortman’s assassinations. And, in apparent reference to some of the words he had previously aimed at Trump, Walz told the station: “Do we have to watch some of that? Yeah.”

Walz, who eulogized Melissa Hortman at her and her husband’s funeral on 28 June, added: “Donald Trump brings out the worst in people, and he brings out the worst in me – because I have certainly never been accused of that with anybody else.”

The governor said his anger with Trump – who investigators say was himself targeted by two assassination attempts during the campaign that vaulted him to a second presidency – stemmed from his pugnacious brand of politics.

As an example, Walz accused Trump of – at best – ignoring the Hortmans in the wake of their killings. In the hours after the killings, the president released a statement in which he said he had “been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against state lawmakers”.

Trump’s statement also said that “such horrific violence will not be tolerated”. But, in speaking to reporters, the president made it a point to say that contacting Walz over the Hortmans’ murders would be a “waste of time”.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out,” Trump said. “Why would I call him?”

Walz in turn told KMSP: “When this state is grieving and this nation saw what happened here, Donald Trump used it as an opportunity to attack me.”

The governor said he was still stricken with grief over the Hortmans’ deaths and lamented that he did not get the chance to foster a friendship with Melissa when neither of them were “in elected office” any longer.

“I think that’s the piece that I regret,” he said.

A federal grand jury on Tuesday handed up various criminal charges – including murder and stalking – against the suspect arrested in the shootings of the Hortmans and Hoffmans. Court documents unsealed alongside the filed charges contained a handwritten letter claiming that the suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was the shooter.

The letter also made a claim dismissed as a lie by prosecutors and Walz: that the governor wanted Boelter to assassinate Minnesota’s Democratic US senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith while threatening to harm the suspect’s family if he refused.

Walz said he had previously been aware of – but did not personally know – Boelter, whom the governor had reappointed in 2019 to serve on Minnesota’s workforce development advisory board. Boelter had first been appointed to that panel in 2016 by Walz’s predecessor, Mark Dayton.

“Never, to the best of my ability, was [I] anywhere around” him, Walz said of Boelter. “[I] certainly don’t know him or talk to him.”

Walz has announced that he is interested in pursuing a third four-year term as Minnesota governor – an office with no term limits – in 2026, though some pundits believe he could contend for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.