Trump’s campaign should take a page from the successful 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush and make the facts on crime stick to Harris and Walz.Trump’s campaign should take a page from the successful 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush and make the facts on crime stick to Harris and Walz.
“Tim Walz let Minnesota burn. Kamala Harris bailed out the ones who lit the matches,” posted former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump on his Truth Social platform last week. Although Trump’s campaign reeled from the Democrats’ sudden change from incumbent President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris last month, a coherent message may now be in sight.
Trump acolytes certainly appear to see it that way, with a rising number of talking heads and likeminded journalists bringing up Walz’s questionable record as Minnesota’s governor during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, among other foibles.
In the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, crime rates spiked 75 percent that year; murder rates are still 50 percent higher than they were in 2019. According to Minneapolis’s progressive mayor Jacob Frey, Walz refused to deploy 600 of the state’s national guardsmen for 18 critical hours as the riots devastated his city’s downtown, destroying numerous businesses and a police station. Sitting in the safety of the governor’s residence in St. Paul, meanwhile, Minnesota’s first lady Gwen Walz left the windows open so that she might, as she told a local television station, “smell the burning tires,” which she hailed as a “very real thing.” Walz eventually deployed 100 guardsmen, who were reportedly too few in number to control the situation.
Then, just weeks away from being chosen as Biden’s vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris urged her Twitter (now X) followers “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF). That organization quickly collected $35 million, which it then used to bail out violent criminals, including some who had no connection to the riots but were merely minority criminal suspects and therefore “victims” of a “structurally racist” criminal justice system.
Those released with the help of MFF funds have included such model citizens as Christopher Boswell, who had twice been convicted of rape and charged with 10 other felonies, including attempted rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault.
