Twenty years ago in Mankato, Chris Faulkner was tending a line of people who wanted to see George W. Bush speak at a campaign rally the Republican president held in a quarry outside the southern Minnesota city.
One of those in line told Faulkner he was a high school teacher and Army National Guard veteran who had come to see “my president” speak. And he’d brought “my students” along to accompany him. That’s how Chris Faulkner remembers it, in recent interviews and an article he’s written re-telling the story of his interaction with a future vice presidential nominee.
Faulkner, who served as the Minnesota field director for the Republican National Committee in 2004, and is a Marine veteran himself, recognized the man from earlier, where the local teacher had protested Bush in advance of his visit with a small group of John Kerry supporters.
A photo captured by then-Republican political operative Michael Brodkorb shows a 40-year-old Tim Walz and a small group of protesters on the side of the road, across the street from a Bush campaign field office. Walz was wearing a red hat, khaki shorts, Adidas-brand sandals and holding a sign that said, “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry.”
The interaction Faulkner and Walz had with one another on a Wednesday afternoon in early August has purportedly served as the catalyst for Walz’s political career. Walz has said so himself at least a handful of times. And a version of the story of their interactions was chronicled a few days later by the late Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman.
But Faulkner says Walz’s version of their interaction isn’t exactly the way he remembers it. He’s had time over the last month to jog his memory of their conversation that day almost exactly 20 years before Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced she had tapped Walz to be her running mate. And a handful of media outlets have reported in recent weeks that Walz’s version of the facts don’t add up, with corroboration from Faulkner.
“So we asked him, well weren’t you just out protesting the other day?” said Faulkner, a veteran Republican political consultant, retelling the story during an interview he participated in late last month with Blaze TV. “And [Walz] said, ‘Well, yes.’ And I said ‘Okay, well then you don’t get to come in, because this is a private event.'”
Walz then told Faulkner he was a veteran, “and these are my students. I want them to see my president.”
“The students weren’t even in high school,” Faulkner said during the Aug. 27 interview. “They were both members of the College Democrats, fine. But our job was to make sure we didn’t have any antiwar protesters or anyone interrupting the president, or, God forbid, throwing anything or something like that.
“Somebody who is clearly a protester and clearly trying to get into our event, and we just told him, ‘no.’ And he threw a fit about it and yelled at us a fair amount and said a couple of choice words and I wished him well. And honestly, I forgot about it after that because he was one of many difficult people I had to deal with on that particular day.”
Faulkner also wrote and published an article on Substack last month, which he entitled, “How I ‘inspired’ Tim Walz to run for office.” In the post, he relives, with some tongue-in-cheek humor, what seemed at the time like another inconsequential interaction he had with hopeful rally attendees that day.
Shortly after Faulkner had told Walz and the pair of students who accompanied him that they couldn’t get access to the rally, Faulkner remembers that Walz said, “I will be back,” and then called Faulkner a “political thug” as he walked away.
“His actions were calculated from the beginning of his career. He’s always been a climber,” Faulkner wrote. “He knew we would ask him to leave. He literally was standing outside our HQ the day before protesting. He brought those students as ‘cover.’ Tim Walz will try hard to make you believe his adopted Minnesota nice attitude but he is a political operator at heart.”
Star Tribune columnist among first to amplify Walz’s account of Bush rally
Walz ended up attending the rally, without the accompaniment of the two students who had intended to join him, according to the Washington Examiner. And the Star Tribune’s politically progressive columnist Nick Coleman helped amplify Walz’s grievance with a column that published Aug. 13 where Coleman wrote that Walz was let into the Bush rally, “only after being threatened with arrest and subjected to a political interrogation.”
While Walz has said that once in the rally he quietly and respectfully watched Bush deliver his campaign speech, he claimed in an August 2020 social media post that on that day in 2004, “above all, I was struck by how deeply divided our country was becoming that a veteran & a group of high schoolers would be turned away at the door.”
“It was at this moment that I decided to run for office,” he said in the post.
Faulkner says that’s not the vibe he got from Walz that day.
“There was kind of a theatrical aspect to it, like he was trying to make a spectacle of himself,” Faulkner said during his interview late last month. “And referring to the high school students as ‘my students,’ when they are actually college students, and they were in the College Democrat club.
“[Walz] was basically kind of putting on a performance for show … it just seemed kind of premeditated.”
Hank Long
Hank Long is a journalism and communications professional whose writing career includes coverage of the Minnesota legislature, city and county governments and the commercial real estate industry. Hank received his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, and his law degree at the University of St. Thomas. The Minnesota native lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and four children. His dream is to be around when the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
