CNN
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The brother of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said Tuesday he disagrees with Democratic policies but expressed some regret about putting himself in the spotlight. Last week, he posted on social media that he was “100 percent against” his brother’s political views and was considering officially endorsing former President Donald Trump.

Jeff Walz, the older brother of Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, said in an interview with NewsNation that he has no intention of “influencing the public” by posting on social media expressing his support for Trump over Harris and his brother’s campaign, nor does he plan to campaign “for or against him” ahead of the November election.

The Harris-Walz campaign team declined to comment.

In response to these comments, Jeff Walz wrote on Facebook that he had not spoken to his brother in eight years, but was “100 percent against his entire ideology.”

In another comment Friday, he responded to the suggestion that he should “go on stage” with Trump and offer him his official support by saying he was balancing his family’s privacy against his desire to keep his brother out of higher public office and suggesting he knew “stories” about Governor Walz that would cast him in a bad light.

“I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time!” he wrote in response to the idea of ​​officially endorsing Trump. “I’m torn between this and just keeping my family out of this. The stories I could tell. Not the kind of person you want to let make decisions about your future.”

Jeff Walz said he regretted sharing his views on Facebook, explaining that he made the posts to make his views clear to people around him who thought he was politically on Tim Walz’s side.

“It was a post I made because I was getting a lot of feedback from my friends and old acquaintances who thought I felt the same way as my brother on this issue, and I just wanted to make that clear to my friends,” he told NewsNation. “I used Facebook, which was not the right platform to do it.”

Jeff Walz lamented the distance between him and his brother. He said it was “a shame” that they had grown apart and expressed hope that they could “have different opinions and still be civil brothers.” He added that any “stories” he had to tell about Tim Walz would not reveal anything “hidden” about him.

“When we were younger, we would go on family trips with my little brother and drive in a station wagon. And the problem was that nobody would sit with him because he would get sick and throw up on us,” he said. “Something like that. There’s really nothing else behind it. People assume something else.”

Jeff Walz declined to tell NewsNation who he will vote for in November, but he has supported Trump since 2016.

The Facebook comments he posted on Friday appeared under a post he originally wrote on March 30, 2023, the same day Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury as part of the investigation into hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Trump was ultimately found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

“We have just become a Third World banana republic,” he wrote that day.

He previously donated $20 to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to federal campaign finance records. And the day after Election Day 2022, he appeared to be responding to stronger-than-expected Democratic performances in elections across the country, except in his home state of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis won re-election by 19 points.

“I am really happy to live in Florida today!” he wrote at the time.

Jeff Walz is one of Tim Walz’s three siblings. They have a sister, Sandy, who lives in Nebraska, and a brother, Craig, who died in 2016.

His brother’s apparent opposition to his campaign puts Tim Walz in line with Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom have seen family members criticize their presidential candidacies. Trump has been repeatedly attacked by his niece Mary Trump and nephew Fred Trump, both of whom have published books about their uncle. Kennedy’s siblings condemned his campaign on multiple occasions over the past year, including after he dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump.