Tim Walz regrets getting ‘sucked in’ to addressing Trump’s pet-eating lies | Tim Walz

Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate in the November presidential election won by Donald Trump, says he deplores how much time he spent addressing the opposing campaign’s decision to spread false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in Springfield, Ohio.

“They sucked me in on” that, Walz said in a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. Echoing similar remarks that he made on a recent episode of the Fast Politics With Molly Jong-Fast podcast, he added: “I was just horrified and angry when they were demonizing folks in Springfield, Ohio. [And] there I was talking for almost a week about immigration, right where they wanted us to be.”

But, Walz said, Trump “was right, for whatever reason … that more people were OK with saying that than they were against”.

The Democratic Minnesota governor’s commentary on the podcasts is some of his most extensive yet on one of the defining moments of his and Harris’s defeat to Trump – who clinched a return to the White House – and his vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

Vance went on CNN in mid-September, a little less than two months before the electoral polls closed, and essentially acknowledged that the rumors in question were rooted in “accounts from … constituents” but otherwise essentially a creation of his and Trump’s campaign meant to draw viral attention to Springfield’s relatively large Haitian population.

Roughly 15,000 mostly Haitian immigrants had started legally trickling into Springfield – a city of about 60,000 – in 2017 to work in local produce packaging and machining factories, availing themselves of a temporary protected status (TPS). The status requires renewal after 18 months, and it was allocated to them because of political violence as well as unrest in their home country.

Vance at the time said he felt it was OK “to create stories” about those people to get voters to focus on the White House’s immigration policies while Harris was vice-president to Joe Biden, who had ended Trump’s first presidency by defeating him four years earlier.

Nonetheless, at their lone debate more than a month later on 22 October, Walz invoked the widely debunked rumor that members of Springfield’s Haitian community were stealing and eating local pets to accuse Vance of seeking to “demonize” immigrants.

“When it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings,” Walz said.

The lies boosted by Vance upended daily life in Springfield for some who grappled with bomb threats aimed at local hospitals and government offices.

Walz told the New Yorker: “That bothered me on a real human basis. On that one, I was pretty fired up, pushing back, it wasn’t fair, we need[ed] to do this.”

Yet none of it mattered. The Harris-Walz ticket ended up losing the electoral college to its Republican counterpart by a 312-226 margin. Trump and Vance, the former US senator from Ohio, also took the popular vote by a margin of about 49.8% to 48.3%.

“We were talking about immigration at a critical part of the campaign, and it was hurtful, and it pissed me off, and I was standing there to defend people,” Walz said on Fast Politics. “And it didn’t do a damn bit of good electorally.”

At the time Walz spoke to the two podcasts, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s second presidency had been widespread workforce cuts affecting federal government agencies providing a wide array of services, including healthcare, military defense, weather forecasts and humanitarian aid.

Trump’s cabinet had generally done little more than defend the cuts as substantial cost-reduction measures, despite a lack of evidence that they would save as much money as the president and his billionaire businessman adviser Elon Musk boasted – and amid widespread concerns that the axed services could sooner or later bear a cost in the form of people’s lives.

“Those people in all those positions are loyal to Donald Trump first and the American people fall right down the line,” said Walz, who recently announced his interest in pursuing a third term as governor of Minnesota – which has no term limits – in 2026. “I appoint people who challenge me daily. That’s how you’re supposed to do leadership.

“I think it’s clear that he’s building an authoritarian government that is [loyal] to Donald Trump first.”