Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) is frustrated. Critics have questioned his masculinity, especially during the 2024 election. He ran for vice president with Kamala Harris and faced endless jabs.
During a podcast with Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Walz vented. He said the criticism even extended to how he drank a milkshake.
“It just baffled me how much time they spent trying to attack me — that I wasn’t like masculine enough in their vision. Like, I would have never believed this,” Walz said. “I saw Fox News did like a couple days because I used a straw. And I’m like, ‘What the hell? What am I — How else do you drink a milkshake?’ type of thing.”
He thought the obsession was bizarre. “But they focused on it obsessively, which I think, again, is their obsession, their weirdness,” he said. Then he claimed conservatives framed everything around sexuality. “We buy their frame on these issues of sexuality, you know, but their whole thing was — is that they spent all their time, these guys, on Fox News that ‘Walz is gay,’ ‘not masculine,’ you know, and ‘he doesn’t coach football the way he should’ … what do you think about this?”
Walz asked Newsom for his take. Newsom agreed masculinity played a big role in politics. He tied it to cultural debates like the Me Too movement.
But Walz wasn’t interested in the theory. “How do you fight it?” he interrupted. When Newsom started to answer, Walz jumped in again. “I think I could kick most of their a**! I do think that … I know I can outrun them,” he said. Then he joked about turning it into a WWE-style fight.
Newsom argued that masculinity and toxicity often get confused. He said people need to separate the two. “We’re going to have to work on that a little bit,” he said.
Walz doubled down. He claimed conservatives were actually afraid of him. “I think some of us scare them. I think I scare them a little bit, it’s why they spend so much time on this,” he said. “No, I’m serious, because I can fix a truck. They know I’m not bull-s****ing on this. But I’m not putting this in people’s grill. I don’t know if — my identity is not hunting. My identity is not football coaching. My identity is not, you know, a beard and a truck.”
But critics didn’t just attack his masculinity. They called him out for lies about his past. He exaggerated his coaching experience. And a staged hunting trip exposed his struggle to load his own firearm.