Donald Trump\u2019s tough-guy shtick plays well on Fox News, so he leaned into it during an appearance on the late-night talk show \u201cGutfeld!\u201d on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Host Greg Gutfeld brought up Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket. Trump, the Republican nominee, quickly disparaged Walz as \u201cstrange.\u201d And then he told a story aimed at presenting Walz as weak and himself as strong \u2014 though with a notable unintended consequence.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, he called up years ago,\u201d Trump began, referring to Walz. The governor\u2019s mansion in Minnesota was surrounded by protesters, Trump said, and Walz was seeking help.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018My house is being surrounded by people with American flags,\u2019\u201d Trump claimed Walz said. \u201cI said, \u2018Is that a good thing or a bad thing?\u2019 He said, \u2018I think they\u2019re going to attack me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Gutfeld guffawed.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut this was during the riots and everything,\u201d Trump continued. \u201cThey were MAGA people, you know, they like the American flag, all right? And they also had Trump [flags].\u201d<\/p>\n
Walz, Trump said, asked Trump to tell people that he was their friend. So Trump got on Twitter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI put out a statement: \u2018He\u2019s a good man, the governor. He\u2019s on our side. I don\u2019t, I didn\u2019t know him, but I didn\u2019t want him to get hurt,\u2019\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd everybody put down their flags and they left.\u201d<\/p>\n
He later added, \u201cIt was sort of a beautiful thing in a lot of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the surface, this story doesn\u2019t make sense, as it didn\u2019t when Trump told it (also on Fox News) soon after Harris picked Walz. For example: There were pro-Trump protesters at the governor\u2019s mansion in Minnesota in the midst of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests?<\/p>\n
Trump did mention Walz in one tweet at the time \u2014 the infamous one in which he warned, \u201cwhen the looting starts, the shooting starts.\u201d His mention of Walz was simply that \u201cthe Military was with him all the way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2026.These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won\u2019t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!<\/p>\n
\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
As it happens, Walz described his end of this exchange to reporters from Politico in 2021. As the governor describes it, he called the White House not at the time of the BLM protests but in April 2020, when protests against coronavirus restrictions \u2014 egged on by Trump \u2014 were targeting a number of Midwestern governors.<\/p>\n
A protest targeting Walz was planned for April 17. Fox News provided predictably supportive coverage to the effort that morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Minnesota,\u201d reporter Mike Tobin reported, \u201cthe demonstrators didn\u2019t even wait for their own planned protest. An organization had planned the protest for today at noon but they got in front of the governor\u2019s residence in St. Paul yesterday. They referenced things like President Trump\u2019s statement that \u2018the cure cannot be worse than the disease.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Tobin noted that the name of the group running the protest was \u201cLiberate Minnesota.\u201d Two minutes after the segment aired, Trump \u2014 a notoriously avid viewer of that channel \u2014 posted a message on Twitter: \u201cLIBERATE MINNESOTA.\u201d<\/p>\n
LIBERATE MINNESOTA!<\/p>\n
\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Speaking to the Politico reporters, Walz identified this message as one that \u201cbrought armed people to my house.\u201d He called the White House to try to understand what \u201cliberate Minnesota\u201d was asking of him, but he didn\u2019t get a response.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust 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,\u201d Walz said in 2021. \u201cThat was a little different at that point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is fair to be a bit more confident in Walz\u2019s recollection of events closer to when they occurred and at a point when he wasn\u2019t running for higher office than it is to rely upon Trump\u2019s presentation on Fox News seven weeks before the presidential election. It\u2019s worth noting, though, that there was another time that pro-Trump protesters gathered at the Minnesota governor\u2019s mansion: on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
That day, of course, Trump was in Washington. He\u2019d stoked the anger of his base repeatedly in the weeks after the 2020 presidential contest, telling them that the election had been stolen (it hadn\u2019t been) and that there were mechanisms by which he could retain the presidency (there weren\u2019t). It was his rhetoric about the pandemic turned to the maximum volume: repeated presentations of how he wanted the world to be that his base accepted as factual \u2014 and actionable.<\/p>\n
Trump repeatedly encouraged the Jan. 6 protest, just as he encouraged the protest in Minnesota. But when those protesters surrounded the Capitol, breaking windows to gain entry and disrupting the counting of electoral votes, Trump sat on his hands. Various people around him encouraged him or his staff to weigh in, to offer the sort of message that he claims rapidly dissipated the crowd in Minnesota. But for hours he simply watched events unfold on TV. He released a video calling for protesters to disband \u2014 and praising them \u2014 at 4:17 p.m., 126 minutes after the first window was broken.<\/p>\n
If we take Trump at his word in the \u201cGutfeld!\u201d conversation, he had seen how, in May 2020, his words encouraged protesters to threaten a Democratic official and he had seen how he could quickly dispel that threat. If this is true, if this is how Trump understood his power to work, it casts the Capitol riot in much darker terms. He should have known both how people would respond to his calls to action and requests to stand down.<\/p>\n
Even if Trump\u2019s anecdote isn\u2019t true, which seems likely, the first part holds. He almost certainly saw a news report crediting his rhetoric with bringing protests to the doorstep of the Minnesota governor and then further stoked that anger. Walz says he called the White House seeking clarity on what he was supposed to be doing \u2014 and Trump never responded. The tension wasn\u2019t defused on the president\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
When Trump claims to have been an innocent observer on Jan. 6, as when he claimed falsely during the debate that he \u201chad nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech,\u201d it\u2019s worth bearing all of this in mind. He\u2019d seen what his rhetoric could do and he claims that he had the power to do more.<\/p>\n
Yet when it comes to the Capitol riot, he insists that he was powerless against forces out of his control.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s tough-guy shtick plays well on Fox News, so he leaned into it during an appearance on the late-night talk show \u201cGutfeld!\u201d on Wednesday. Host Greg Gutfeld brought up Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket. Trump, the Republican nominee, quickly disparaged Walz as \u201cstrange.\u201d And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9790,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}