Minnesota Governor Tim Walz revealed on Thursday that people have been driving by his home and shouting the same slur used by President Donald Trump to describe him.
At a news conference held on Thursday to respond to Minnesota’s November 2025 budget, the 61-year-old governor also addressed the president’s tirades against the Somali residents of his state and the impact of Trump’s decision to describe Walz as “ret---ed.”
“Are you okay with the president calling our neighbors garbage? Are you okay with him referring to Minnesota as a ‘hellhole’, factually untrue? This creates danger,” Walz said.
”And I’ll tell you what, in my time on this, I’ve never seen this before: people driving by my house and using the r-word in front of people. This is shameful, and I have yet to see a Republican elected official say, ‘You’re right, that’s shameful. He should not say it.‘”
The president, 79, deployed the slur against Walz in a rambling late-night Thanksgiving Truth Social post, dubbing him the “seriously ret---ed Governor of Minnesota” who “does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both” while Rep. Ilhan Omar “does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how ‘badly’ she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government.”
Walz delivered a pithy response to the tirade on X, simply writing, “Release the MRI results.” At the time, the president had not yet disclosed why he underwent an MRI during his physical in October. The White House has since claimed that the test was “preventative,“ a claim many medical experts have expressed skepticism about.
When asked on Sunday whether he stood by his usage of the word, considered by many to be a slur against people with intellectual disabilities, the president doubled down, telling reporters, “There’s something wrong with him, absolutely, sure. I think there’s something wrong with him.”
He continued, ”Anybody that would do what he did, anybody that would allow those people into a state and pay billions of dollars [to] Somalia—we give billions of dollars to Somalia. It’s not even a country, because it doesn’t function like a country. It’s got a name, but it doesn’t function like a country. Yeah, there’s something wrong with Walz.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The president’s eldest son, Don Jr., responded to Walz’s news conference in a post on X. “They’re not wrong,” he wrote, referring to the people driving by Walz’s house and hurling insults.
Walz’s state of Minnesota is home to the largest population of Somali Americans in the U.S., and Trump has repeatedly singled them out, calling them “garbage“ and claiming he wanted to send them “back to where they came from.”
He has also threatened to strip temporary legal protections from Somali migrants, and used reports of investigations into incidents of fraud in Minnesota’s social services system, some of which were allegedly committed by Somalis, to condemn the entire community.
Walz described the president’s attacks as “unprecedented for a United States president” and has said that his “hateful words don’t stand in Minnesota.”
“The only thing that’s hurting this state, as he so falsely claimed to a group of people, is Donald Trump himself.”
