Fact check: Trump revives false claim that he, not Minnesota’s governor, deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020

Daniel Dale, CNN
Sun, July 28, 2024 at 11:50 AM EDT
4 min read

Former President Donald Trump has revived his four-year-old false claim about how he and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz handled the civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Walz is among the Democrats whom sources say Vice President Kamala Harris is considering as a potential running mate. Trump, the Republican nominee, claimed during a Saturday campaign speech in Minnesota: “Every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago — remember me? I couldn’t get your governor to act. He’s supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army. And he didn’t do it. I couldn’t get your governor. So I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis.” (Trump went on to criticize Harris for her own response to the unrest.)

CNN fact-checked this Trump story in July 2020. But he has repeated the tale on multiple subsequent occasions, including an abbreviated version during his June 2024 presidential debate with President Joe Biden.

Facts First: Trump’s claims that he sent the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 and that Walz refused to do so are both wrong. Walz, not Trump, sent the National Guard to Minneapolis — and Walz first deployed the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself.

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