After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, as the video of his last moments ricocheted around the country and sent waves of demonstrators onto Minnesota streets, Gov. Tim Walz sat with public safety officials and pondered his options. The protests were growing increasingly violent, and the Minneapolis mayor had requested that Walz send the National Guard to help. To Walz, the question was not just how many guard members he could muster, but what they would do when they got there. “There were people out in those streets who were in grief over decades of systemic racism — they saw murder,” Walz recalled, reports the Washington Post. "And there were people out in those streets that didn’t care and who didn’t know who George Floyd was, and meant to do harm. I had to make sure that I was clearly making decisions … to create a space where those folks could protest.”
Walz’s decisions in the days after Floyd was killed are facing newfound scrutiny now that Vice President Kamala Harris has selected him as her running mate in a suddenly upended race for the White House. Former president Trump and his allies are seizing on criticism from other Democrats that Walz was too slow to act to portray him as weak — another lenient liberal politician, in their telling, who gave a pass to protesters and allowed destruction in their cities. Walz “allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” says Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). Back in 2020, Trump said responsibility for the destruction in Minneapolis did not lie with the governor. “I don’t blame you,” he told Walz. “I blame the mayor.” Some Republicans criticize his handling of the crisis as insufficiently tough, while many activists say he acted with compassion and restraint.
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