Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) complained about the fact that critics had cast doubt on his “masculinity,” particularly during the 2024 presidential election while he’d been vying for the vice presidency alongside running mate, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Walz voiced his frustrations during a conversation with Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) for his new podcast, noting that he’d even been criticized once for using a straw.
WATCH:
NEW: Tim Walz GRIPES about attacks on his masculinity during 2024 campaign
“It just baffled me how much time they spent trying to attack me — that I wasn’t like masculine enough in their vision. Like, I would have never believed this.” @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/3p4YkCpslv
— Jason Cohen
(@JasonJournoDC) March 18, 2025
“It just baffled me how much time they spent trying to attack me — that I wasn’t like masculine enough in their vision. Like, I would have never believed this,” Walz said. “I saw Fox News did like a couple days because I used a straw. And I’m like, ‘What the hell? What am I — How else do you drink a milkshake?’ type of thing.”
“But they focused on it obsessively, which I think, again, is their obsession, their weirdness,” Walz continued. “We buy their frame on these issues of sexuality, you know, but their whole thing was — is that they spent all their time, these guys, on Fox News that ‘Walz is gay,’ ‘not masculine,’ you know, and ‘he doesn’t coach football the way he should’ … what do you think about this?”
Walz turned to Newsom, who said, “This notion of masculinity is deeply part of it. I mean, I think it goes — you can look at the reasons why we’ve had this sort of dialectic over the Me Too movement, we’ve had this dialectic even prior to the Me Too movement and this notion of —”
“How do you fight it?” Walz interrupted. When Newsom attempted to answer, the Minnesota governor interrupted again, claiming, “I think I could kick most of their a**! I do think that … I know I can outrun them. I don’t know if we’re going to fall into that place where we, okay, we challenge you to, you know, a WWE fight here, type of thing.”
The conversation about masculinity — and “toxicity in masculinity” — continued with Newsom arguing that too many people had conflated the two ideas: “We’re going to have to work on that a little bit.”
WATCH:
Tampon Tim Walz on his masculinity: “I think I scare them a little bit.” pic.twitter.com/oiU36BvGky
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 19, 2025
Walz followed by claiming that he believed conservatives were actually intimidated by him, adding, “I think some of us scare them. I think I scare them a little bit, it’s why they spend so much time on this. No, I’m serious, because I can fix a truck. They know I’m not bull-s****ing on this. But I’m not putting this in people’s grill. I don’t know if — my identity is not hunting. My identity is not football coaching. My identity is not, you know, a beard and a truck.”
Walz took criticism primarily for the lies he’s told throughout his career — some of which pertained to his time as an assistant football coach — and a campaign stunt in which he took reporters hunting with him and then struggled mightily to load his own firearm.
