The Republican candidate for the White House reacted on Wednesday to the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate. In an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump considered Tim Walz to be “a shocking choice” but that he is “excited.”

“I can’t believe he was the choice. He’s very liberal and it’s a shocking choice. I couldn’t be more excited,” Trump said in a phone interview with Fox & Friends.

The former president said he only spoke once with the Minnesota government and found it friendly. But the criticisms he left of his policies were anything but friendly. “He is even worse than them. [Biden e Harris]. It is a moderate version. [Harris]. He is [radical] like Bernie Sanders, maybe more. This is a candidacy that would lead us to communism,” he said.

Regarding Walz’s policies during his time as a congressman and then as governor, Trump highlighted his lack of concern for immigration control and security issues (“no borders, no security”) and his gender-affirming policies for Minnesota youth (“loves everything transgender”).”

The Republican candidate also considered that there were other, much better options within the Democratic Party. “It is very insulting to Jews. Any Jew who votes for these people has to control himself,” he argued.

Asked whether Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania and a Jewish man, would be a better choice, Trump admitted that he would still be mean, but not as mean to Walz. As the hosts noted, Republicans had already geared their campaign to counter Shapiro’s popularity and point out his mistakes. To the New York Times, Trump’s close advisers admitted they were relieved that Shapiro was not Harris’s choice.

Aligned with the party and seeing Tim Walz as an easier target, Trump declared himself “enthusiastic” and promised debates in the near future. He argued that the media were the only ones on the side of the Democratic couple: “but you are not,” he said, addressing the Fox presenters. He therefore again expressed his desire to debate Harris on FoxNews, after having rejected an appointment on ABC.

Trump agrees to debate Kamala Harris on September 4 on Fox News

April 2020: The only conversation between Trump and Walz

In the interview, Trump shared that the only time he spoke to Walz was after he called him during the anti-lockdown protests at the start of the pandemic. “I kind of supported him during the riots,” he said.

According to Trump, Walz called him, since he was president, asking him to disperse the people, with American flags and MAGA signs, who were gathering near “his mansion, with no security.” The former president then asked for tempers to calm down and the people returned home quietly: “They can’t be very bad people,” Trump said. Walz proceeded to call him again to thank him for his intervention.

Walz’s account of this brief phone call is quite different. Walz reports that thousands of protesters gathered outside his home, encouraged by a social media post by the then-president demanding the “liberation of Minnesota.” Trump’s call was a reference to the harsh Covid-19 restrictions passed by Walz’s state administration under harsh criticism from the opposition.

“They sent armed people to my house,” Tim Walz accused in an interview in September 2021, a group that included members of the neo-Nazi group Proud Boys. The interview with Politico was not published in full at the time and was made public last month, on the occasion of his rise as a national public figure.

Walz criticized Donald Trump’s communication style, saying he didn’t feel heard by the then-president. “I was trying to humanize him, to show that we were working together,” he argued, saying he even put his teenage daughter on the phone to tell Trump how scared she was by the protests outside her home in a quiet residential area.

The security problem was repeated over the summer, during the most critical period of the Walz administration. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, and eventually the country and the entire world were inundated with protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. In Minneapolis, the protests turned into violent riots.

Despite calling the protesters’ violence unacceptable, Walz led a proposal to overhaul police funding and training, which led to Floyd’s death in a show of excessive force. Trump – and his vice president JD Vance – have also criticised this measure, accusing Walz of being responsible for “defunding the police” – another example of his lack of concern for safety, they argue.

After quarantine and Black Lives Matter, Walz’s Minnesota home ended up being evacuated on January 6, 2020, Walz reported. This time, the threat was Donald Trump supporters, who questioned the outcome of the presidential election that gave Joe Biden the victory.