Readers Write: Candidate misstatements, support for Trump

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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In the last month I’ve learned three things that surprised me about Gov. Tim Walz: He embellishes his past to make a point politically important to him, he can speak so fast that it is hard to follow his point — even though he articulates the words well — and he is a passionate speaker. I had to think through the implications.

Saturday’s Star Tribune piece on the weight of past embellishments is undoubtedly catnip to Donald Trump supporters, who now also have Sen. JD Vance’s lies to ignore or use tortured logic to justify when they vote for the leaders of the free world (“Gaffe or lie? Walz’s words on China meet scrutiny,” Oct. 5). No real problem since Trump’s cruel mendacity — shocking and truly disturbing to half the U.S. and most of the developed world’s democracies — is now internalized and ignored, if not welcomed, by his eager supporters. But to those independent voters who may be paying attention to these Walz verbal gaffes, I invite you to think about when they were said and who they directly affected, then compare them to Vance’s recent remarks — just those since on the campaign trail. Outright lies that resulted in death threats. Then think about the character revealed by their reactions when both candidates were called out: Walz nervously stumbling over explanation and apology. Vance smoothly justifying vicious and harmful lies without either logic or apology. He added two jaw dropping, bizarro-world lies in the debate with the same smooth and shameless delivery. So the GOP presents us with two candidates for whom truth is a victim and, even at the national policy level, is not just a nuisance but an enemy to be vanquished. This is not the America I grew up in.

David Paulson, Minnetonka

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Commentators are jumping on Walz’s account of his first trip to China. They accuse him of telling false tales, even lying, about his experience in China in 1989.

They seem most exercised by his gaffe that he was there during the Tiananmen Square bloody protest. These comments miss the significance of his story no matter the mix-up in chronology about a time in his life 35 years ago.

The Tiananmen protest was more than just one day in June 1989. Acts of civil disobedience were reported in over 100 cities across China in the months following June 4. Even a town on the edge of the Gobi Desert, 2,200 miles away from Beijing, had local protests and then witnessed the repression that followed. In Hong Kong, the news of Tiananmen was particularly resonant with the many refugees who had previously fled to this English colony. In fact, in 1997, when Hong Kong was handed over to the People’s Republic of China, Beijing officials viciously attacked protesters there and banned works and demonstrations that supported the movement for democracy in China.

During the time Walz studied Chinese in Hong Kong and taught English in a neighboring province, he could not have missed the horror and extent of Beijing’s continuing suppression of dissent of any kind.

Rather than focusing on mixing up the dates of his arrival in China and the event most of the world watched on the evening news that night in June of 1989, let’s consider the message here: Walz is aware of China’s authoritarian nature, which began long before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rise. As an educator, he traveled there frequently. In that capacity, he would have seen and then processed with his students the lack of freedom and civil and human rights that is in evidence everywhere in China.

Candidate Trump does not act or speak as though he knows anything about the history and politics of modern China. If he did, he would not be a fawning admirer of Xi. Walz will have realistic policies on China informed by his own history and personal experience dating back to the Tiananmen era. That is what is important about this part of his personal story.

Richard Kagan, Dent, Minn.

The writer is a professor emeritus of East Asian history at Hamline University.

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Of course it’s true that Walz shouldn’t have said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre if he wasn’t there. But there’s an element of absurdity about that issue getting so much attention when the Trump ticket lies so frequently that we’ve come to expect it. Where’s the page-one story about Vance’s lie during the vice presidential debate that Trump tried to save Obamacare? Trump continuing to lie about his losing the 2020 election barely makes the headlines anymore, stuffed into a paragraph deep inside an inside-page story if it makes news at all. Likewise, Trump sycophant Sen. Tom Cotton wouldn’t admit, during an interview after the vice presidential debate, that Trump lost the 2020 election, getting snippy that the interviewer asked that obvious and important question.

So, of course, if Walz lied or misspoke about his time in China, take him to task for it. But then do the same every time Trump or his supporters lie — the difficulty being there’s not enough newsprint or bandwidth to accommodate the outrage that’s become ordinary, the overflowing bucket of lies that’s the hallmark of the Trump campaign.

Steve Schild, Falcon Heights

For whatever reason, the Star Tribune has been providing plenty of examples of preachiness of late.

Take, for example, one of Karen Tolkkinen’s preachy columns, most recently the one on how Gov. Tim Walz’s very offensive comment that Minnesota beyond the freeway belt was just “rocks and cows” (“Let’s give the rocks and cows of Minnesota the proper respect,” Sept. 28). This was, she “explained,” really funny, and just misunderstood. Right. Thanks for the help.

And now, we are being instructed by the Rev. Angela Denker that we should feel sorry for our friends in greater Minnesota, victims as they are of eight years of the Republican Party “capitalizing on the pain of the rural people I love” (“Ghosts don’t vote, but haunted people do,” Strib Voices, Oct. 4).

Creating victims is the new science of progressives, instead of creating solutions. The economic problems, which go hand in hand with the social difficulties one sees in much of rural America, including Minnesota, have been a slow build over several decades. What is clearly seen in many of those areas is the effect an overall policy of economic globalism that has left most of them in the “have not” category. Former President Donald Trump very directly addresses these issues in his policies, for better or worse, and they see this. Acting in self-interest requires no pity. The contempt being heaped upon all those “deplorable” folks out there by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Walz and so many perceived “elites” is very much coming home to roost. There is nothing in the current flavor of progressivism that has anything to offer them. Trump speaks directly to them.

Denker is to be commended for venturing into the “Land Beyond the 94s.” Others should follow. Listen to what you hear and, in the end, the person you may be feeling sorry for is yourself.

Fritz Knaak, White Bear Lake

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The letter writer of “Cut the condescension” (Readers Write, Oct. 7) was upset about a Strib Voices column by the Rev. Angela Denker, and he cited reasons such as food and fuel prices, interest rates and border security as reasons why rural voters support Trump over Kamala Harris. He also cited the Christian faith and the abortion issue as a reason, but this rings hollow. They might not choose to vote for Harris, but men and women who are truly followers of Christ would not vote for a man who has expressed no remorse for his inappropriate sexual behavior toward many women and bragged about doing so. They would not vote for a man who, again without remorse, cheated on his wives. They would not vote for a man who has publicly bragged about routinely walking unannounced into beauty pageant dressing rooms while the women and girls were naked.

This isn’t a rural-vs.-urban issue as the letter writer claims. It’s an issue of basic human decency regardless of how you feel about abortion and a woman’s right to choose.

Ed Thompson, Winona, Minn.