President Trump has defended calling Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded,” declaring Sunday night that “there’s something wrong with him.”
Trump, 79, doubled down days after he hurled the insult at the Democrat in a social media rant about immigration — blasting Minnesota leaders for allowing an influx of hundreds of thousands of Somali migrants into the state.
“I think there’s something wrong with him. Absolutely,” Trump told reporters as he returned to the nation’s capital after spending Thanksgiving weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.
“Anybody that would do what he did, anybody that would allow those people into his state and pay billions of dollars out to Somalia. We give billions of dollars to Somalia. It’s not even a country because it doesn’t function like a country. It’s got a name but it doesn’t function like a country.”
“There is something wrong with Walz,” he added.
Initially, Trump had raged that Walz — the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee — had allowed Somali migrants to take over his “once great state.”
“Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone,” he wrote on Truth Social late Thursday.
“The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both.”
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have charged at least 78 defendants — many from the Somali diaspora who settled in the Twin Cities — with stealing funds from a federally funded child nutrition program, winning more than 50 convictions.
Walz fired back Sunday by questioning the president’s own mental state.
“Release the MRI results,” the governor wrote on X, referring to the results of Trump’s Oct. 10 medical checkup, which he touted at the time as “perfect.”
Walz elaborated on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.
“Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving — where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football, or whatever — this guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy,” he said.
“It’s clear the president’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else, there are reasons for us to be concerned.”
Trump, for his part, insisted Sunday that he’d be fine with the results of his MRI being made public.
“If they want to release it, it’s OK with me to release it,” the president said.
