US Election: Family of Kamala Harris Running Mate, Tim Walz Endorsed Donald Trump
Former President Donald Trump claimed Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s estranged brother endorsed him Wednesday, and shared a viral image purporting to show Walz family members wearing pro-Trump shirts—but Walz’s mother reportedly said the image features distant relatives, and his brother Jeff Walz indicated he doesn’t plan on endorsing anybody.
Trump thanked “Jeff” for his purported endorsement in a Truth Social post on Wednesday and said they planned to meet “soon,” including in the post a photo of eight people wearing T-shirts printed with the slogan “Walz’s [sic] for Trump.”
Tim Walz’s mother, Darlene Walz, a lifelong Democrat who predicted Vice President Kamala Harris will beat Trump in November, told The Daily Beast the family members pictured are “mostly second cousins,” while Walz’s sister, Sandy Dietrich, told the Associated Press, “we weren’t close with them. We didn’t know them.”
The family members pictured said in a statement to the Associated Press that they are descendants of Francis Walz, the brother of Tim Walz’s grandfather.
The photo—which made the rounds among pro-Trump social media users—was initially shared on X Wednesday by Charles Herbster, the chairman of Rural Americans for Trump and a former Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate.
Herbster’s spokesperson Rod Edwards told Forbes a friend of the Walz family provided Herbster’s team with the photo, and while Edwards didn’t specify the family members’ names, he said the Minnesota governor’s older brother Jeff Walz—the subject of Trump’s post—was not in the image.
Trump’s separate claim that Jeff Walz endorsed him came hours after the older Walz—who donated $20 to Trump’s 2016 campaign—told NewsNation he “thought long and hard” about endorsing Trump, but doesn’t want to “put something out there to influence the general public.”
Jeff Walz’s political views first made waves after The New York Post unearthed a series of Facebook posts he made last week denouncing his brother’s politics and warning he is not the “type of character you want making decisions about your future,” cryptically citing “stories [he] could tell” (he later told NewsNation the “stories” were innocuous accounts of growing up together, like Tim Walz’s tendency to become car sick).
Source: FORBES
