Top line
Former President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that the estranged brother of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz had endorsed him, even though Jeff Walz had said hours earlier that he had no plans to publicly endorse the ex-president. Trump backed up that claim with an unverified image circulating online that purported to show members of the Walz family wearing pro-Trump T-shirts.
Minnesota’s Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks during a campaign rally on … (+)
Key data
Trump thanked “Jeff” for his support in a Truth Social post on Wednesday and said they planned to meet “soon.” In the post, he included a photo of eight people wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Walz’s (sic) for Trump.”
The photo was first shared on X Wednesday by Charles Herbster, chairman of Rural Americans for Trump and former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska, and later made the rounds among pro-Trump social media users.
The family members pictured are descendants of Francis Walz, the brother of Tim Walz’s grandfather, Herbster’s spokesman Rod Edwards told Forbes, adding that a friend of the Walz family provided the photo to Herbster’s team and one of the people confirmed the authenticity of the image directly to Edwards.
Edwards did not name the family members, but said Minnesota Governor Jeff Walz’s older brother – the subject of Trump’s post – was not in the photo.
Trump’s claim that Jeff Walz had endorsed him came just hours after the elder Walz – who donated $20 to Trump’s campaign in 2016 – told NewsNation that he had “thought long and hard” about whether to endorse Trump but did not want to “reveal anything that could influence the general public.”
Jeff Walz’s political views first made waves after the New York Post unearthed a series of Facebook posts last week in which he slammed his brother’s politics and warned that he was not the “type of person you want to let make decisions about your future,” while cryptically referring to “stories (he) could tell” (he later explained to NewsNation that the “stories” were innocuous accounts of growing up together, such as Tim Walz’s tendency to get motion sick).
Forbes has asked Trump and Harris’ campaign teams for comment.
Important background
Jeff Walz wrote on Facebook and later told NewsNation that his family received no advance warning that his brother had been nominated as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate. He told NewsNation he wrote the posts to explain his political views to friends and acquaintances, acknowledging that Facebook was “not the right platform for that.” Jeff Walz said he and his brother had not spoken since the funeral of their younger brother Craig in 2016, aside from a brief conversation in which he asked his older brother for tax information that Harris’ vetting team needed but which Jeff Walz said he was unwilling to release.
tangent
Walz, who was nominated as Harris’s vice presidential running mate early last month, is in his second term as Minnesota governor and previously represented a rural district in the Minnesota House of Representatives for 12 years. He is a retired high school teacher and football coach who served 24 years in the National Guard. Walz grew up in Nebraska before moving to Minnesota with his wife, Gwen, in the 1990s.
Large number
36%. That’s the share of American adults who view Walz favorably, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll that found 25% view him unfavorably. Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance has an approval rating of 27%, while 44% of respondents view him unfavorably.
More information
Everything you need to know about Tim Walz before his DNC speech (Forbes)
Kamala Harris nominates Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate: What you should know about him (Forbes)
Polls by Tim Walz and JD Vance: Walz more popular than Vance in early polls (Forbes)
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