Gov. Tim Walz has repeatedly excused certain inconsistencies between his record and his rhetoric by saying he misspoke. On Wednesday, less than 24 hours after a mostly unnoteworthy vice presidential debate, Walz said one of the more head-scratching moments of the debate — when he claimed he had befriended school shooters — was, once again, because he didn’t get his words right.
“You have seen me do this,” Walz said. “I was talking about being people where there are school shooters, and I need to be more specific on that, but I am passionate about this.”
Walz clarified his remarks Wednesday while answering questions after arriving in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the first stop on a swing through multiple battleground states.
Noting his error on school shootings, as well as another controversy that Walz blamed on misspeaking — Walz claimed Tuesday night that he simply misspoke when he said during a 2014 congressional hearing that he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — the Minnesota governor presented the issues as unintentional misstatements, not purposeful lies.
“I speak like everybody else speaks,” he said.
“Trying to convey these messages, especially on the school shooters, and I think for all of us here, it’s pretty damn clear that I stand with the victims, pretty damn clear that I passed legislation to make sure this is less of an issue,” Walz said.
He noted that, as a member of Congress, he sat with parents of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and he said he calls gun violence activist David Hogg a personal friend.
What Walz said Tuesday night — “I’ve become friends with school shooters” — truly does appear to be a misstatement. At the time, he was talking about the “nightmare” of a school shooting, disclosing that his son had even witnessed a shooting at a community center while playing volleyball.
But his Tiananmen Square comments are more difficult to chalk up to a rhetorical flub.
In 2014, Walz said he was in China at the start of the 1989 protests and that he remembers news blackouts as the summer went on. During a 2019 radio interview, Walz claimed he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989 — the day of the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
But Walz actually arrived in China in August of 1989, months after the Tiananmen Square protests.
When asked on Wednesday about his previous claims that he was in the country during the protests, Walz tried to brush it aside.
“I had my dates wrong,” he said.
“I need to be clearer, I will tell you that. But here’s my whole point on this thing with China. I understand China a hell of a lot better than Donald Trump,” Walz said.
Walz previously claimed in 2016 that he had visited China “about 30 times.” He also said during a 2016 congressional hearing that he had visited China “dozens and dozens and dozens of times.” But when CNN pressed the Kamala Harris campaign on how many times Walz had actually visited China, a spokesperson said it was “likely closer to 15.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.