Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made many outlandish and bizarre claims during his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, ranging from the offensive and false assertion that immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets to the notion that the economy was spectacular during his presidency.
The former President also brought up Minnesota more than once, and got the facts wrong whenever he did.
It’s true that Minnesota’s national profile has risen significantly in recent years. Our Democratic governor, Tim Walz, became Harris’s running mate in August, leading to a flood of interest in both Walz and the state he’s presided over since 2018. And before that, Minneapolis became the epicenter of a global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered there that same year.
Walz has clearly gotten under the skin of both Trump and his running mate, Republican Senator J.D. Vance. Maybe it’s Walz’s popularity, both as a governor and as a vice presidential candidate. On that front, he’s got Vance beat by quite a margin. A recent poll from USA Today and Suffolk University found that Walz ranks much higher than Vance with nearly every category of voter. Only 15 percent of Black voters polled found Vance appealing, for example, while more than half approved of Walz.
When Harris brought up reproductive choice during the September 10 debate, Trump launched into a deranged sounding rant against Walz, claiming the Democratic vice presidential pick not only supports allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, but also the execution of newborn babies. It’s bizarre, it’s absurd, it’s blatantly false—and it’s nothing more than typical Trump outlandishness designed to paper over real policy differences.
Walz has, in fact, emerged as a regional, if not national, leader when it comes to protecting reproductive health care rights in Minnesota. He was the first governor in the United States to sign a bill codifying abortion access following the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, thus making Minnesota a magnet for people from other, more restrictive states seeking abortion care—such as neighboring North Dakota, which has attempted to completely ban abortion care.
Just two days after Trump’s tirade against Walz’s abortion policies, a judge in North Dakota struck down the state’s truly extreme abortion ban, declaring that it violates the state’s constitutional guarantee of personal liberty. Between the 2022 loss of federal protections provided by Roe v. Wade and a 2023 revision in state law that allowed abortions in the case of rape or incest, abortion access in North Dakota was severely limited. These restrictions put doctors at risk of imprisonment for providing health care intended to save lives and forced North Dakota’s only abortion provider to move across state lines into Minnesota. It’s clear that Trump’s egregious claims about Walz’s reproductive health care policies are a deflection from the dystopian, anti-choice nightmare that many people in Republican-led states are now forced to endure.
It is also clear that Trump is spewing lies about the social unrest in Minneapolis in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, falsely claiming Harris let the city burn during the protests. This version of agitprop, designed to rile up people with pro-police authoritarian tendencies, neatly glides over a key point from those turbulent days.
On May 27, just a few days after Floyd’s death, a man dressed in all-black with his face obscured by a large black umbrella started a fire at an AutoZone building in South Minneapolis. At the time, many people in the area wondered who he was and what he was really up to. It turns out they had a reason to be suspicious. Minneapolis arson investigator and police officer Erika Christensen tracked him down and revealed that the arsonist was a man named Mitchell Wesley Carlson, a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Carlson was also affiliated with a white supremacist prisoners outfit known as the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood. Police used his actions as a justification to unleash violence against protesters who were exercising their right to peacefully demonstrate. Several journalists were also injured in the melee that followed.
At that time, Harris was a U.S. Senator. While watching the civil unrest take hold in Minneapolis, she encouraged people via X to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a non-profit organization that helps raise bail funds for individuals who have been arrested. According to news reports, that was the extent of Harris’s involvement with the Freedom Fund. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from alleging that her actions helped violent protestors burn Minneapolis to the ground. These outrageous claims obscure the real truth: For one brief, likely emotional, moment in time, a politician of Harris’s stature put bail reform on our collective radar.
Trump is using Minnesota as a stage to disparage Walz and indulge bizarre conspiracy theories. It’s not going to work.