Darlene Walz, Tim Walz’s mother, is not getting involved in the rift between her son, who is running for vice president, and his brother, who is a Trump supporter and a thorn in the side of the Harris-Walz campaign team.
“I want to keep the peace,” Walz, 89, said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast from her home in Butte, Nebraska, which she described as “a spot on the street in the middle of nowhere.”
Walz said she wants her son and Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump and JD Vance – she predicted the two would win and her son, the governor of Minnesota, would “become vice president.” But she did not want to interfere in her two sons’ complicated relationship.
Darlene Walz has been a lifelong Democrat. She supported her son in his successful run for Congress, visited “every town in Minnesota” when he ran for governor, and attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to see her son Tim accept his party’s nomination for vice president. “Oh man, that was a blast,” she said. “It was wonderful.”
Tim and Darlene Walz pose together for a photo.
Photo by Governor Tim Walz/Facebook
But the gap between her sons Tim and Jeff Walz is apparently too big and fragile for her to try to intervene.
“I think the best thing for me is to just stay out of it,” she told the Daily Beast.
Their older son, Jeff Walz, who lives in the ultra-conservative town of Freeport in the Florida Panhandle, is being persuaded by Donald Trump and the MAGA World to commit the ultimate act of political defiance against his liberal brother: They want his support. The 67-year-old Walz brother admitted in a Facebook post last week: “I have thought long and hard about doing something like this! I am torn between this and just keeping my family out of this.”
Darlene Walz said her daughter Cathy Dietrich asked Jeff Walz to tone down his divisive attacks on her brother. Whatever she said to her brother seemed to work, because on Tuesday he walked back his online rant against Gov. Walz, saying: NewsNation on Tuesday that although he does not agree with his brother’s political views, he will not try to influence the outcome of the election.
“There will be no further explanations to anyone and we will not be running a campaign, either for him or against him or anything like that,” he said.
Darlene Walz described her daughter, who also lives in Nebraska, as a “die-hard Democrat.”
“Maybe we hope there will be a better resolution at some point,” the Minnesota governor’s mother told the Daily Beast about the relationship between her two living sons. Her third son, Craig Walz, died in 2016 when a tree fell on his campsite. All four of her children were teachers, the proud mother said.
The vice presidential candidate’s mother said that the members of the Nebraska Walz for Trump family, whose photo went viral on the Internet on Wednesday, are mostly “second cousins” on her late husband’s side.
Tim Walz’s extended family expresses their support for Donald Trump in a photo shared on social media this week.
Photo by MattWolking/X
The photo was first posted by Charles Herbster, a Nebraska Republican who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022.
Rod Edwards, a spokesman for Herbster, told the Associated Press that they were Walz’s second cousins.
“The family in the picture are the descendants of Francis Walz, the brother of Tim Walz’s grandfather,” Edwards said. “They are all Walzes and their spouses.”
Trump used the photo opportunity to thank Jeff Walz for an endorsement he didn’t give. Darlene Walz said she wasn’t at all surprised to see the Nebraska side of the Walz family beaming in the photo while wearing their custom-made Trump T-shirts.
“My in-laws were different,” she said, adding that she did not mean that in a negative way. In most families in the deeply divided United States, there are both Republicans and Democrats.
“That’s OK, that’s OK,” said Darlene Walz. Her only advice to polarized families like her own is: “Shut up and go vote.”
