Kristi Noem attacks Tim Walz's handling of 2020 protests after police murder of George Floyd

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem has said she watched Tim Walz “let his city burn” in 2020.

Gov. Kristi Noem speaks at the Calvin Coolidge Foundation conference at the Library of Congress on Feb. 17, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

She is referring to the protests that took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Walz was and still is governor, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. In the wake of the protests, Walz ordered a partial mobilization of the National Guard on 28 May 2020, before ordering a full mobilization on 30 May 2020.

She implied that Trump’s decision for federal intervention in LA was important to preventing scenes such as those in Minneapolis in 2020.

The president and I talked about this in the past and he was not going to let that happen to another city and another community where a bad governor made a bad decision.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth also earlier tried to compare Walz and California governor Gavin Newsom’s respective handling of the protests, saying:

President Trump recognizes a situation like that, improperly handled by a governor, like it was by Governor Waltz ... If it gets out of control, it’s a bad situation for the citizens of any location.

In fact, in June 2020, Donald Trump had heaped praise on Walz for his state-controlled use of the National Guard, telling a conference call of governors:

What they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.

Trump’s tune changed in July last year when he was the Republican presidential nominee:

Every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago — remember me? — I couldn’t get your governor to act. He’s supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army. And he didn’t do it.