Tim Walz Isn’t Giving In to Trump-Era Despair Welcome to the weekend. Tim Walz acknowledges that Democrats have not “done a good enough job” of listening to voters, but is optimistic about his party’s chances of winning gubernatorial elections this year in New Jersey and Virginia and potentially picking up seats in special elections, which could lead to Republicans distancing themselves from Donald Trump.
“What I worry about is, just like a cornered rat, he’s going to start lashing out again,” the Minnesota governor tells Eric Lutz. “That’s why I would expect you to see him double down on his horrific policies around immigration and no due process. He will scapegoat the LGBT community. He will go after political rivals. We need to be buckled up and ready to go.”
Walz, who burst onto the national scene as Kamala Harris’s running mate, tells Lutz that the emerging “resistance feels different to me” this time around. “I just think it’s more focused and it’s less dependent on an election or a candidate,” he says. “It’s more focused on, ‘You’re not going to do this to America. You’re not going to do this to my neighborhood.’”
Here’s something else the administration is doing to America: Issie Lapowsky reports how Trump’s plan to cut NPR and PBS will particularly hurt red states. A former NPR exec notes that “the local stations get harmed, and then the communities get harmed, and it’s one more thing that disadvantages them.”
Elsewhere, Keziah Weir explores America’s infatuation with protein, while Nate Freeman digs into plans for the Venice Biennale’s United States pavilion and the mystery swirling around it.
Plus, I learned a lot about Sam Altman this week from biographer and Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, who joined Radhika Jones, Claire Howorth, and me on Inside the Hive. Check out the interview here. Thanks, as always, for reading and listening. See you next week.
—Michael Calderone, editor |
