Walz: I Misspoke About Being in Hong Kong During the Tiananmen Square Protest

BRENNA: “We want to ask you about your leadership qualities. Governor Walz, you said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, but Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn‘t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?”
WALZ: “Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there that didn‘t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small rural Nebraska town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the street lights come on, and I‘m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI Bill to become a teacher, passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of ‘89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They — look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I‘ve tried to do the best I can, but I‘ve not been perfect and I‘m a knucklehead at times, but it‘s always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for 12 years, and in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people, working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So, look, my commitment has been from the beginning to make sure that I‘m there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times I will talk a lot, I will get caught up in the rhetoric, but being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life, I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn‘t be praising Xi Jinping about Covid and I guarantee you he wouldn‘t start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world. It‘s about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it‘s putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or it was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.”
BRENNAN: “Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?”
WALZ: “No, all I said on this was, is I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I will just — that‘s what I‘ve said. So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, went in, and from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in in governance.”
BRENNAN: “Thank you, governor.”