The hosts of the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends” welcomed Donald Trump by phone on Wednesday morning, offering the former president the opportunity to opine on his candidacy and his opponent’s newly named vice-presidential pick without pushback.

They wasted no time, prompting Trump at the outset to offer his opinion of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). Trump’s response, though, was perhaps not what they expected.

“I know him a little bit,” Trump began, before embarking on a riff about how he’d helped Walz at one point in his presidency.

“During the riots,” Trump said, Walz’s house “was surrounded by people that were waving an American flag — doesn’t sound like very bad people — and he called me and he was very concerned, very, very concerned that it was going to get out of control.”

Walz, Trump said, asked Trump to “put out the word that I’m a good person.” Trump did, he continued, telling the world that Walz is a good person. “Everybody put down their flags and took their flags with them,” Trump said. “But they took their American flags and their MAGA flags and they left.” Walz then called back to thank the president, Trump continued, which was the “only thing I ever had to do with him.”

The hosts didn’t press him on the anecdote, eager to declare that Walz’s nomination was “a gift for you.” But there are certainly elements of the story that don’t make much sense.

For example, one would assume that when Trump is referring to “the riots,” he means the looting and vandalism that spun out of protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. But why would there be people with MAGA — “Make America great again” — flags protesting outside the Minnesota governor’s mansion at that point? Why would people protesting the killing of George Floyd be willing to disperse at Trump’s request but not Walz’s?

Beyond that, it’s not clear how Trump purportedly “put out the word” about how Walz was a good guy. The only public mention of Walz by Trump in that time period was an infamous post on Twitter that didn’t offer an opinion of the governor.

“Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way,” Trump wrote on May 29, 2020. “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

A few hours later, new light was shed on the subject, courtesy of Politico. Two of its reporters interviewed Walz in 2021 as part of a book project, releasing more of the interview following his selection to join Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. What Walz described then was not that he sought Trump’s assistance with protesters during the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing but, instead, that Trump had encouraged hostile protesters at two other points in that time period.

The first was in April 2020, after Trump had briefly endorsed an effort to curtail the spread of the coronavirus by limiting person-to-person contact. He quickly backtracked from that endorsement, pivoting to criticisms of state leaders who weren’t quickly lifting those restrictions.

The morning of April 17, Trump posted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” on Twitter. At about the same time, a planned protest at the governor’s mansion got underway.

Walz told Politico’s Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin that the post “brought armed people to my house,” including members of the Proud Boys. Given the timeline, it’s not clear if the post drew armed protesters or if it simply encouraged them. Some of those involved offered their appreciation to Trump for his support.

At some point, Walz, who the day prior had been part of a joint announcement about scaling back restrictions, reached out to Trump.

“I called the White House, and left a message and I asked, kindly if not the president, someone could call,” Walz said. “And he tweeted two words: ‘Liberate Minnesota.’ ‘ At another point in the interview, Walz suggested that the call came after the social-media post, that he called to ask for clarification about it.

“I said ‘What does “Liberate Minnesota” mean?,’ ‘ Walz said. ‘ ‘What do you want me to do differently? What do you think that I’m doing or not doing?’ ”

He says he didn’t get an answer.

There was another point at which Trump supporters surrounded the governor’s mansion: the day of the riot in Washington.

“[O]n Jan. 6, when the Capitol riot happened we had that too, and there were, of course, legislators as well as some of these elements that believe the election was stolen, marched on the residence, and that’s the one where it got way out of hand,” Walz said. “The state patrol had to evacuate my 14-year-old, find the dog, take him to an off-site location.”

If Walz requested that Trump call off his supporters on that day, he didn’t mention it. Trump did not make a request that his supporters in Minnesota stand down; he was slow to even call for his supporters on Capitol Hill to do so.

There were times during the protests over Floyd’s killing that Walz said his security was increased but, again, it’s clear from Trump’s comments that he’s talking about a protest driven by his supporters, like the ones in April 2020 or January 2021. It seems clear, too, that Trump’s claim to have served as Walz’s savior contradicts the available evidence.

Assuming he’s referring to the April events, the call from Walz (which the governor says didn’t include a conversation) was not, as Trump said, the “only thing I ever had to do with him.” The two worked together at the time of the Floyd protests. In fact, Trump in one call released publicly said to Walz of the violence that “I don’t blame you, I blame the mayor” of Minneapolis.

That’s as close to “Walz is a good person” as Trump is likely to get any time soon.

Two weeks ago, I noted that the early signs for JD Vance as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential nominee were not encouraging. He was a historically unpopular running mate. The polls seemed to confirm what was already evident: He wasn’t a particularly voter-friendly pick, dating back to an underperforming 2022 Ohio Senate campaign in which every other Republican running for statewide office did better in their races.

The signs since then have only gotten worse.

A half-dozen polls have now tested views of Vance more than once in the last few weeks. In each of them, his already-underwhelming image ratings have deteriorated — sometimes significantly.

And crucially, his struggles appear particularly pronounced among educated voters and women. That would suggest that his derisive past comments about childless women are indeed proving to be liabilities.

But first, the big picture. Vance’s net favorable rating (favorable vs. unfavorable) is now nine points underwater in the FiveThirtyEight average. That’s a marked contrast to other recent running mates, who have generally polled in popular territory.

And notably, three of the repeated polls show about as many people view Vance very unfavorably as have any kind of positive view of him.

His net favorable ratings have dropped:

• Three points in Reuters-Ipsos polls between July 16 and July 28 (the end dates for the polls).
• Five points in Economist-YouGov polls between July 23 and July 30.
• Eight points in AP-NORC polls between July 15 and July 29.
• Nine points in other YouGov polls (that weren’t sponsored by a media outlet) between July 15 and July 25.
• Nine points in ABC News-Ipsos polls between July 20 and July 27.
• And six points in a new NPR/PBS/Marist College poll, versus its July 22 poll.

Digging into specific groups can be problematic, because they involve smaller sample sizes with bigger margins of error. And not all polls provide such detail — at least publicly. But the story of Vance’s decline is similar across these polls.

Vance’s net favorable rating has declined among women by around 10 points in each of the Marist, Economist-YouGov and other YouGov polls.

He’s declined among independents by double digits in both the Marist and YouGov polls. (Though he ticked up slightly in the Economist-YouGov poll.)

He’s declined at least 19 points among Black voters in the Marist, YouGov and Economist-YouGov polls. And he’s also down double digits among voters under 30 in two of those three polls.

In the Marist poll — the most recent and detailed high-quality survey we have — Vance’s net image has declined by 28 points among college-educated voters and 14 points among women who are political independents.

Vance’s numbers overall and with many of these groups are now similar to Trump’s. That might make logical sense given the two are on the same ticket. But in the recent past, even running mates of unpopular nominees have generally been popular — including Mike Pence in 2020, and both Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016.

Vance isn’t getting that same benefit of the doubt. Instead, his status as a historically unpopular running mate appears to be cementing.

The fundamental irony of Donald Trump’s ascent as the focal point of the Republican Party is that it piggybacked on the GOP’s anti-elite movement, which emerged in the tea party era. Rank-and-file Republicans were frustrated with the party’s establishment in Washington and angry at the perception of being told by political elites what they should do or what they should believe. This was to a significant extent an outcry that masked their more significant complaints and concerns, but it was the ostensible predicate for the anger.

And then they nominated a billionaire Manhattanite to be their presidential candidate in 2016.

We aren’t breaking new ground in observing this, certainly; this contrast has been adjudicated any number of times before. But it remains striking that Trump and his party assertively campaign in opposition to elites while asking voters to support candidates who, by most measures, would qualify as elites themselves.

This is made only more striking with Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate as she seeks the presidency. Walz is an elite in the sense that he is governor of a state; that level of power carries some eliteness. But on the measures by which Americans evaluate being elite in a more abstract sense, Walz is about as un-elite as any member of a major-party ticket in recent decades.

In 2022, Yahoo News commissioned the polling firm YouGov to ask Americans what qualified as “elite.” A number of possibilities were offered, including a rejection of the idea that there were any elites to be described. But a consistent pattern emerged from the responses: Eliteness is about money and power. That held among both Democrats and Republicans — though each were more likely to say their ideological foes were elites than members of their own side.

Overall, there were five characteristics that about 20 percent of respondents suggested qualified someone as “elite.” If they were rich (regardless of ideology), if they made over $100,000 a year, if they ran a big business, if they worked in D.C. or if they graduated from a “highly-ranked” college. So we figured it would be interesting to see how many recent candidates on a major-party ticket met each of those conditions at the time they were seeking election.

The results are shown below, with each matching qualification indicated with a monocle.

Information on education came from simple Wikipedia searches and involved some subjectivity; Harris’s degrees from Howard University and the University of California College of the Law were determined to meet the standard, for example. “Rich” is inherently subjective, so we used a net worth of $1 million to meet the standard. (That information and information on salaries came largely from Open Secrets.)

The contrast between Walz and Trump is sharp. Trump owns a big business, even if he isn’t the titular leader of it at this point. He is a billionaire. He attended the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. We didn’t include the “lives on the coast” qualifier here since not many Americans view that as an essential marker of eliteness, but Trump does and long has.

Walz does make more than $100,000 a year; his salary as governor is about $150,000. But he’s not rich by the standard above. Barron’s put his net worth somewhere in the range of $362,000 to $830,000, the bulk of which was “a rental room in his home that he valued at between $250,000 and $500,000.” An analysis by Axios determined that he owns no stock — not to mention “no book deals or speaking fees or crypto or racehorse interests,” if you can imagine such a thing. He attended public universities and lives in Minnesota.

If anything, Walz is an un-elite. But “elite” has always been about perceptions, not measures. So a billionaire New Yorker who objects to immigration is hailed as a down-to-earth reflection of the working class, while a guy from Scranton, Pa., who attended the University of Delaware and advocates addressing climate change is an unacceptable avatar of elite America.

We can expect Walz to be lumped in with the “liberal elites” soon enough, perhaps by Trump’s running mate, Yale University graduate and former Silicon Valley venture capitalist JD Vance. It’s just how politics works.

In its new poll of voters in Wisconsin, the Marquette Law School Poll did something unusual, a sort of inversion of the approach pollsters had been taking over the past few months. In addition to asking whom people preferred between the two major-party candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, it also asked whom people would prefer if President Joe Biden had remained in the race.

This was not a response to Trump’s recent suggestion on social media that Biden somehow plans to regain the nomination, perhaps a bit of wish-casting on the Republican’s part. Instead, it offers a comparison between what is and what was, in the same way that polling before Biden withdrew often asked about a Trump-vs.-Harris race to compare what was (at the time) with what might be (and now is).

Among likely voters, Harris has a four-point lead in Wisconsin (before respondents were pushed to pick between the two candidates). Were the race still Trump against Biden, Biden would be trailing by three points — a seven-point swing.

This is not a perfect comparison, certainly, given that people’s views of Biden and a Biden-Trump race are necessarily colored by the events of the past few weeks. But when we dig into the numbers a little further, we see that there are shifts that probably capture a fundamental change in the race.

For months before his withdrawal from the race, Democrats fretted that Biden simply wasn’t seeing the support from younger voters that he needed. Younger voters soured on Biden fairly early in his presidency, and presidential polling reflected that apathy. As with independents and non-White voters — groups that overlap more with younger Americans than older ones — Biden was underperforming past Democrats, including himself in 2020.

In Marquette’s poll, the biggest difference between support for Biden and support for Harris was among younger respondents and demographic categories into which younger voters fall. Among those under 30, Harris does 11 points better than Biden and Trump does five points worse, a 16-point shift. Harris narrows the gap among those ages 30 to 44 by 11 points. Among independents, Harris does 10 points better; among independents who lean Democratic — a group into which many younger voters fall — she does 13 points better.

Exit polls in 2020 had Biden beating Trump by 23 points among Wisconsin voters under 30. Harris leads Trump by 30 points with that group now, while a Biden-Trump contest would give the president only a 14-point advantage.

This mirrors a widening gap among younger voters nationally. In YouGov polling conducted for the Economist, Harris led Trump by 13 points shortly before Biden withdrew. In the most recent poll, she leads Trump by 31 points. (The graph below indicates the days when YouGov’s polls were being conducted.)

An analysis of the national vote by Pew Research Center after the 2020 election found that Biden beat Trump among voters under 30 by 24 points nationally.

Again, a shift among younger voters is crucially important to Harris. The difference between the results in 2016 and 2020 can be attributed to the decreased density of older voters in the electorate in the latter contest. And while younger voters still express less enthusiasm about voting in November than do Americans overall, the fraction of voters under 30 who say they are enthusiastic about doing so went from a quarter to a third over the past month.

There are plenty of caveats here, certainly, of which you probably don’t need to be reminded. The election is months away, Harris’s campaign is still new, polling has been off the mark at times in recent years, etc. These polls, though, reflect the sort of change that Democrats wanted and need to see to prevent Trump from regaining the presidency.

Before he joined the Democratic presidential ticket, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had emerged as one of the most prominent champions for transgender rights and gender-affirming care as legislation restricting access proliferated across the country.

In March 2023, Walz issued an executive order protecting trans patients’ ability to receive medical care that helps them live according to their gender identity. The order also shields patients, parents and providers from punishment by other states for seeking and delivering such care. The next month, he signed legislation enshrining similar protections that supporters said would establish Minnesota as a “trans refuge.”

After Vice President Kamala Harris named Walz as her running mate, conservatives began attacking those actions, falsely accusing him of allowing the state to terminate parental custody if parents prevent their trans children from receiving gender-affirming care.

The Minnesota law allows courts to have “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming care. Kat Rohn, executive director of OutFront, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in St. Paul, said the law gives courts the ability to resolve disputes when parents disagree on whether their child should receive gender-affirming care; it does not remove custody from parents who decline such care.

In providing gender-affirming care for trans children and adolescents, clinicians may offer patients counseling to assist in their social transition to match their gender identity such as changing their names, pronouns and hair styles. They may also prescribe puberty-suppressing treatments under close monitoring. They generally do not offer genital surgeries until adulthood.

Republican nominee Donald Trump said on Fox News on Wednesday that Walz is “very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great.” As president, Trump and his administration restricted the rights of transgender people, including barring them from military service and eliminating protections against discrimination in health care. Trump, in his campaign, has vowed to bar federal agencies from promoting the concept of gender transition.

His campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt also appeared on Fox News on Tuesday to criticize Walz for signing legislation that makes menstrual products available in school restrooms, regardless of gender, to accommodate transgender students.

LGBTQ+ advocates praised the governor for his record as a forceful defender of transgender rights and his broader support for their community, stretching back to 1999, when he served as faculty adviser to the gay-straight alliance club at the high school where he coached football and taught social studies. Erin Reed, an LGBTQ+ activist who tracks legislation targeting the community, described Walz on X as “one of the most protective governors towards trans people.”

Minnesota’s adoption of protections for transgender people coincided with some of its neighboring states — North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska — restricting access to gender-affirming health care.

Walz entered his second term as governor in 2023 after Minnesota voters elected a dozen state lawmakers who identified as LGBTQ+ — the most in state history. The Democratic legislators formed a “queer caucus” that prioritized passing a trans refuge bill designed to prevent the state from enforcing court orders from other states to remove children from parents who approve gender-affirming care.

Minnesota Rep. Leigh Finke (D), the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker and leader of the caucus, said she asked the governor’s aides if Walz could issue an executive order as she worked on passing the trans refuge bill in a legislature where Democrats held the Senate majority by just one seat. Walz’s 2023 order buoyed those efforts, activists said.

“I cannot imagine the stress that families and individuals go through, but here in Minnesota, we’re going to be a place of refuge to make sure that they feel safe and welcome,” Walz said in a news conference announcing his executive order.

He also blasted Republican politicians who restricted access to care as bullies. Half of all states enacted laws or policies limiting youth access to gender-affirming care, including 23 that imposed penalties on health-care practitioners who offered such care, according to KFF, a health policy organization.

“Imagine what the human emotion was in that room when they did that with absolutely nothing to gain for themselves, not following any factual data and simply using the state apparatus to bring cruelty down on the most innocent amongst us,” Walz said at the time.

Walz’s stance was especially notable coming from a Democrat from a rural area who represented a swing district in Congress. Activists credited him for making the issue mainstream by casting access to gender-affirming care as fitting into Midwestern values of caring for neighbors and his broader vision for making Minnesota the best state in which to raise kids.

Dave Edwards, whose 14-year-old transgender daughter stood by Walz as he signed the executive order and trans refuge bill, said the governor’s matter-of-fact approach to supporting trans rights sets a model for people who do not have a personal connection to the issue.

“He communicates that ‘I care about everyone, so of course I care about you and I don’t need to look like you or sound like you to know your lives are important,’ ” said Edwards, who advocates for gender inclusivity in schools. “To have someone just frame things like ‘trans people exist’ feels like a breath of fresh air.”

Rohn, the LGBTQ+ advocate, recalled Walz pulling her aside during an LGBTQ+ lobbying day at the Capitol and asking how he could support those facing vitriolic online harassment while the bill was being considered.

Finke, the transgender lawmaker who was a prime target of the harassment, said Walz would periodically inquire about her well-being.

“He cares about doing what’s right,” Finke said. “I was inspired by his willingness to champion our rights at a time when we are vulnerable”

Walz’s backing of the bill continues to draw intense criticism from Republicans and conservative activists who said it threatened parental rights, mischaracterizing what the law does.

Jeff Evans, president and CEO of the Minnesota Family Council, a Christian organization, condemned “the so-called Trans Refuge bill which could take children away from their parents if parents do not provide access to harmful ‘gender-affirming care,’ ” in an X post after Harris tapped Walz as her running mate.

Conservative radio host Megyn Kelly falsely accused Walz of signing a bill that lets the state take away children from parents who do not agree to “sterilize them & chop off their body parts in the name of ‘gender affirming care.’ ”

For trans advocates, Walz’s support came at a crucial moment.

A. Kade Goepford, medical director of the gender health program at Children’s Minnesota, said the organization has seen an increase in phone calls from out-of-state parents seeking gender-affirming care for their children.

“Knowing that Minnesota was a place that their children and their families would belong and could get the health care they needed,” Goepford said, helped cement Minnesota in their eyes as “the best place for us to raise our family.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the Project 2025 policy blueprint or the people behind it. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he wrote in a social media post in July.

But in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to people familiar with the trip, plane-tracking data and a photograph from on board the plane, which has not been previously reported. They flew together to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage’s forthcoming policy proposals.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in the speech.

Separately, Roberts told The Washington Post in an interview in April of this year that he had previously discussed Project 2025 with Trump as part of offering briefings to all presidential candidates. “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” he said in the interview, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Roberts never briefed Trump. A Heritage spokeswoman declined to elaborate on private meetings.

The flight, Trump’s speech and Roberts’s interview cut against the former president’s recent efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 once Democrats turned some of its most controversial proposals into a frequent campaign attack. The proposals came from alumni of Trump’s first term and often overlap with his own official campaign pronouncements, such as eliminating the Education Department, weakening protections for career civil servants, ending affirmative action and reversing restrictions on greenhouse gases. One of the proposals calls for federal restrictions on access to abortion medication, a position at odds with the Trump campaign stance.

“Project 2025 has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies,” Leavitt said. “As President Trump himself and our campaign leadership have repeatedly stated, President Trump’s 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and the RNC platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”

Trump and Roberts flew together in April 2022 from the former president’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., to the foundation’s annual conference in Amelia Island. Heritage chartered the plane since Trump’s jet was being refurbished at the time, according to two people familiar with the trip who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions.

At that time, Heritage was in the early stages of organizing Project 2025. Roberts brought it up with Trump on the flight, but Trump seemed uninterested and moved on to another subject, according to a Heritage official. A Trump campaign official said Trump and Roberts didn’t discuss Project 2025 on the plane ride.

Trump briefly described meeting Heritage staff during his keynote at the conference. “With Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Roberts took over day-to-day management of Project 2025 last week with the departure of Director Paul Dans. The project is winding down its policy work in anticipation of handing off its recommendations to the official presidential transition. The project will continue to operate a database of 20,000 applicants for Republican political appointments.

Participants are still drafting executive orders and conducting training classes for potential future administration officials, a person involved in the project said. In private, the person said, Roberts has told people Trump isn’t really that mad, instead attributing the backlash to top Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

“Some chapter writers see this as a disaster, a catastrophe, that it’s really bad for them. Others think it’s going to blow over,” the person involved in the project said. “The wishful thinking school is that this will all blow over.”

The Heritage Foundation has since 1980 published a book of policy recommendations for the next Republican administration. For this cycle, the foundation set out to convene a coalition of more than 100 right-wing groups, presenting the proposals as a movement consensus under the banner of Project 2025. The coalition involved at least 140 Trump administration alumni, according to a CNN tally, including Dans, former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and former White House budget director Russ Vought.

Heritage published the 900-page agency-by-agency policy book in 2023, and it was not until recent months that Democratic attention on its proposals exploded. They have particularly focused on the Project 2025 proposal to ban shipments of abortion medication and through the mail — which departs from Trump’s stated plans.

Trump and his advisers chafed at the critical media coverage that Project 2025 generated, especially when leaders including Roberts brushed off repeated warnings to keep their heads down. Roberts himself drew backlash for a July interview on the right-wing “War Room” podcast (which was hosted by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon until he reported to prison), in which he said, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Miller has started forcefully denying any role in the project. His America First Legal group was part of the coalition, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Justice Department. Others, such as Vought, who wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president and served as policy director for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, has kept a lower profile since the Trump campaign started admonishing the project.

Others who Trump specifically said he would consider bringing back into a second administration contributed chapters to the project, including former adviser Peter Navarro on trade; former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller on the Pentagon; and former HUD secretary Ben Carson on housing. Navarro served four months in prison over his refusal to testify before Congress about efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Roberts also has a relationship with Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book, “Dawn’s Early Light.” In the foreword, Vance called Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” On Tuesday, Roberts announced that he would delay publication until after the election.

Roberts previously raised suspicion among Trump advisers who viewed him as favoring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during the presidential Republican primary. Advisers also said Trump resents other groups such as Heritage raising money that he believes should go to his campaign.

At other times, though, Trump has praised Roberts. He singled him out in February during a speech in Nashville to the National Religious Broadcasters. “Heritage Foundation president, somebody else doing an unbelievable job,” Trump said. “He’s bringing it back to levels it’s never seen, Dr. Kevin Roberts. Kevin, thank you.”

On Tuesday, congressional Democrats called on Roberts to release Project 2025’s plans for the first 180 days of a new administration. This “fourth pillar” was not published, unlike the overall policy recommendations.

“It is time to stop hiding the ball on what we are concerned could very well be the most radical, extreme, and dangerous parts of Project 2025,” Democratic lawmakers led by Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a letter to Roberts. “If we are wrong about that — if your secret ‘Fourth Pillar’ of Project 2025 is actually a defensible, responsible, and constitutional action plan for the first days of a second Trump presidency — then we hope you will publish it, without edits or redaction.”

Tim Walz was weighing a life-altering decision when he stepped into a supply room at the National Guard Armory in New Ulm, Minn., nearly two decades ago. He closed the door behind him, recalled a colleague, Al Bonnifield, and confided he was considering whether to leave their unit even though it was preparing to go to war so he could run for Congress.

“It was a very long conversation behind closed doors,” said Bonnifield. “He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time.”

Walz, 60, ultimately chose to leave the Guard in 2005 and went on to win a House seat the following year, unseating a Republican incumbent as a populist wave of opposition to the Iraq War lifted Democrats to a majority of both chambers of Congress. That jump-started a political career that saw him elected governor of Minnesota in 2018 and, this week, selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in a heated race for the White House.

But while Walz and his political allies have cited his 24 years of military experience as an asset, the circumstances of his departure from the National Guard and his characterization of his service already have come under attack. At least three former Guard colleagues have publicly voiced bitterness at Walz’s decision to leave their unit at such a consequential moment. It’s not clear how widespread that feeling was, but the Trump campaign has moved quickly to capitalize on the issue.

“Nobody wants to go to war. I didn’t want to go, but I went,” Doug Julin, a retired National Guard soldier who worked with Walz, said in an interview. “The big frustration was that he let his troops down.”

The Harris campaign did not address criticisms from fellow soldiers that he retired to avoid going to war. Instead, the campaign said that while in Congress he was a “tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform.” As vice president, the campaign said in a statement to The Washington Post, “he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”

Walz, a native of West Point, Neb., enlisted in the Nebraska Army National Guard at age 17. His father served during the Korean War era, and urged both him and his sister to enlist, Walz said during a 2009 interview for an oral history project by the Library of Congress. Walz shifted to the Minnesota Army National Guard in 1996 after relocating with his wife, Gwen. He was activated for a variety of missions, including responses to forest fires, tornadoes and flooding.

On Wednesday, Walz also came under scrutiny for saying during a gubernatorial campaign event in 2018 that “we can make sure those weapons of war that I carried in war” are not on America’s streets. Walz did not serve in combat, according to the Minnesota Army National Guard, and his Republican counterpart jumped on those comments.

“He said we shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets,” JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, said during a campaign event in Michigan. “Well, I wonder. Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?”

The Harris campaign, in response to those comments, said in its statement to The Post that Walz carried, fired and trained others how to use “weapons of war innumerable times.” It declined to address why Walz claimed incorrectly to have done so in war.

“Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country — in fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country,” the statement said. Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, served in Iraq in a noncombat role for six months beginning in fall 2005.

Walz and his political allies also have inaccurately described him as a retired command sergeant major, one rank higher than he holds in retirement. Walz himself did so in a video clip from 2006 that was surfaced by C-SPAN on Tuesday and in a 2018 clip posted on his own YouTube account.

“I’m a retired sergeant major in the Army and the Army National Guard,” he told a group of voters in the latter video.

Though Walz did achieve the rank of command sergeant major, it was a provisional rank until he completed required coursework for senior leaders, National Guard officials said. He did not do so by the time he departed the military and his retirement rank reverted to master sergeant on May 15, 2005, officials said. Walz retired the next day.

The Harris campaign declined to address why Walz has inaccurately said he retired as one. He has sometimes called himself a “former command sergeant major,” which is accurate.

Walz, asked by the oral-history interviewer where his combat experience occurred, said initially that his unit — the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery — had served “throughout the European theater with Operation Enduring Freedom,” the name the Pentagon used to describe the war in Afghanistan and other counterterrorism assignments.

Walz clarified later in the interview that he and his fellow Guard members initially thought they would fire artillery, but later learned they would be assigned in Europe to backfill other U.S. troops who were going to war.

“I think in the beginning, many of my troops were disappointed,” Walz said, recalling how he was assigned in Vicenza, Italy. “I think they felt a little guilty, many of them, that they weren’t enough in the fight up front as this was happening.”

But Thomas Behrends, a retired command sergeant major who also was on that deployment, said it was very clear that their unit was not going to war.

“He’s sugarcoating it to make it more than it was,” Behrends said. After 9/11, he added, the Air Force realized it needed to better safeguard its airfields and requested the National Guard to assist.

“That was the mission from the get-go,” Behrends said. “There was nothing ever said about going to combat.”

Behrends has been a vocal critic of Walz’s since at least 2018, when he and another Guard member, Paul Herr, placed a scathing letter to the editor in a local newspaper, the West Central Tribune, that accused Walz of exaggerating his military career for years as he ran for governor.

“He failed his country. He failed his state. He failed the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, and his fellow Soldiers,” Behrends and Herr wrote. “And he failed to lead by example. Shameful.”

Behrends, who replaced Walz as the unit’s command sergeant major, has donated to Republican political causes in the past. In 2022, he promoted a petition on his Facebook page demanding that Walz resign as governor, posting a photo of a grain silo — Behrends is a farmer — festooned with the phrase “Walz is a traitor!”

He also stood next to Walz’s gubernatorial opponent, Republican Scott Jensen, at a campaign event that year and donated $2,500 to Jensen’s campaign, records show. He acknowledged in an interview Wednesday that he has made political donations in the past and said they were not about politics. He went on to call Walz “as far left as they come,” and said he can’t speak to whether other candidates are lying, but does know “for a fact that Tim Walz is lying about his record.”

“I always thought he was somebody that talked too much,” he said of their time serving together. “It was like, ‘God, could he just sit down and shut up?’ But he liked to hear himself talk, the same as he does now.”

Joe Eustice, who served in the National Guard with Walz for at least a decade, said he vehemently disagrees with Walz’s politics but described him as a good soldier. In an interview, he rejected assertions that Walz avoided combat duty. In late spring 2005, when Walz said he wanted to pursue politics and decided to retire, there was only speculation of a combat deployment on the horizon, Eustice said.

“Other than having a rumor, we were not notified that we were going to be deployed,” Eustice said.

The unit received an official alert order two months after Walz had retired, the Minnesota National Guard said, which helped the unit prepare for mobilization later in the fall.

Walz, when asked by the Library of Congress historian about his retirement, said that he did so to run for Congress, adding that he was concerned about trying to serve in the military and run for office simultaneously. He also cited worries about the Hatch Act, which restricts partisan political activity by federal employees.

Julin, who oversaw Walz as a more senior command sergeant major, said that Walz approached him in 2005 and said he was prepared to go on their upcoming deployment to Iraq, but also was interested in running for Congress. Julin said he thought “no big deal” because other members of Congress had deployed.

But a couple of months later, Julin learned from another member of the Guard that Walz had retired. Julin was frustrated, he said, because Walz had arranged his retirement with two officers who outranked Julin.

“I would have analyzed it and challenged him,” Julin said. “It would have been a different discussion, but he went to the higher ranks. He knew I would have told him, ‘Suck it up, we’re going.’”

Bonnifield, who listened as Walz pondered his future nearly 20 years ago, said the future politician appeared then to have no fear about the possibility of danger.

“He was not that kind of man,” said Bonnifield. “Absolutely not.”

The deployment to Iraq turned out to be grueling for their unit, which was deployed to Camp Scania, a way station between Baghdad and Kuwait constantly targeted by insurgents with rockets and other long-range fire, Bonnifield said. On the day their deployment was supposed to end, he said, it was extended an extra six months. The soldiers were away from home for a total of 22 months, he said, and multiple people died.

Bonnifield, who described himself as a Democrat willing to vote across party lines, said he thought Walz made the right career decision. He later voted for Walz, whom he said he has spoken to only once since, during a chance encounter at a political event.

“If I had the same choices, I probably would have done the same thing,” he said.

Patrick Murphy, the first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress, met Walz on Capitol Hill in 2006 during their orientation as freshman lawmakers, Murphy said in an interview. They quickly bonded while rooming together in a modest apartment on Capitol Hill, he said.

Both felt the Iraq War was a disaster, and Walz said he believed he could do more as a policymaker to avoid such conflicts rather than deploy again, Murphy recalled. While Walz did not see combat, his service in Italy still meant leaving his family behind.

“We have yanked these citizen-soldiers around for the last two decades,” Murphy said. “The Pentagon, the Army, they pick where you go. You don’t get the chance to go where you want.”

Walz served on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and pushed for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Pentagon’s policy at the time that prevented gay service members from being open about their sexuality. He also supported in 2008 the Post-9/11 GI Bill, legislation that provided far more generous education support than the previous benefit.

Vance has credited the expanded benefits for his ability to attend Yale Law School. Vance should thank Walz for that, Murphy said, “instead of criticizing him for his military record.”

Nicole Markus and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) said that she joined the effort to convince President Biden to abandon his reelection bid because the president’s campaign was losing badly and placing “rose petals” on the path to a victory by former president Donald Trump.

“Now I was really asking for a better campaign. We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory. Members knew that in their districts,” the former House speaker told a small group of reporters during an interview Wednesday promoting her new book.

In her most extensive remarks yet about the political earthquake over the last five weeks, Pelosi said that Biden’s June 27 debate debacle and the aftermath revealed two troubling signs making it all but inevitable that Trump would return to the White House: The president was performing poorly as a candidate and his campaign operation was also flawed.

“My goal in life was that that man would never set foot in the White House again,” she said of Trump, pounding the table nine times for emphasis and to explain why she acted. “And I could not see an unfolding of events that were just putting rose petals in front of him to go there.”

Pelosi declined to go into any specifics about her conversations with Biden or other senior Democrats following the debate, sticking to previous assertions that she did not lead any effort to oust Biden after a crescendo of Democratic elected officials questioned the president’s ability to win his reelection race. But she acknowledged that she counseled many lawmakers and other Democrats who desperately wanted to see a change at the top of the ticket.

“I didn’t make one call. I did not make one call. People called me — hundreds,” she said.

Her message to these Democrats was to flood Biden’s top advisers with their complaints. “I spoke to close friends or whatever, and said the same thing: Whatever you have to say, say to them. I’m not your messenger,” Pelosi said.

Asked whether she ever directly told Biden that he needed to step aside or else Trump would win, she demurred.

“I won’t answer that question,” she said.

The White House declined to comment on Pelosi’s remarks.

Pelosi’s role in the three-week drama over whether Biden would step aside was carefully parsed and studiously watched by Democrats of every rank — even though she is no longer House speaker, she commands great respect not only in the halls of the Capitol but also as a Democratic Party power broker. Her July 10 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” prompted many in Washington to believe that Biden was reconsidering his vow to stay in the race, and the political world paid heed when Pelosi told some California lawmakers that Biden’s time in the race may be short.

But it’s only since she began promoting “The Art of Power,” her book recounting key moments during 20 years as the House Democratic leader, that Pelosi has, little by little, elaborated on the events that led to Vice President Harris as the party’s new nominee.

Pelosi acknowledged that “Morning Joe” appearance prompted rank-and-file Democrats to believe she had reopened the matter for discussion.

“It was not my intention to put him on the spot on the show,” Pelosi said, explaining their belief that she gave them room to challenge Biden. “Oh my God, you gave us space, you gave us space.”

Within a week of that interview, about two dozen Democratic members of Congress called for Biden to bow out, with many more conveying their concerns privately.

“He may think that my statement unleashed something — I don’t know, because I haven’t spoken to him since,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi said she used her TV appearance to channel the anger over Biden’s letter two days before to every Democrat on Capitol Hill, in which he defiantly said he was running and essentially ordered lawmakers to fall in line.

“The letter wasn’t well received in Congress, I don’t know if you know that,” Pelosi said. “It was not well received. I don’t even know who wrote it. Like, what?”

Pelosi said she now goes weeks without talking to Biden since she stepped out of House leadership at the end of 2022.

Biden and Pelosi first met in 1983 at a California Democratic Party event honoring her tenure as state party chair. They bonded over their shared Catholic faith, rising through the corridors of Washington power without Ivy League educations and similar political values.

She acknowledged that last month’s turn of events has created personal pain in a more than 40-year friendship.

“So we are friends for a very long time. I love him so much. We pray together. I cry over it, I lose sleep over it and the rest, but that’s what evolved,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi took a dismissive attitude toward one of Biden’s longest-serving confidants, Mike Donilon, who has served as his presidential adviser, advertising script writer and top speechwriter. She denied press accounts that she and Biden had a talk in which they disputed polling data and suggested he put Donilon on the phone to go through the granular details.

“I didn’t know what Donilon did over there. I get the brothers mixed up, as a matter of fact,” she said, referencing his brother, Tom Donilon, who has served as a foreign policy adviser to three Democratic presidents.

“I didn’t even know what Donilon did. I thought he was a speechwriter,” she said. “Yeah, I thought he was a speechwriter. Isn’t he a speechwriter?”

Pelosi said that she had advised Biden months ago not to debate Trump at all. She said she feared that the ex-president would turn the debate into “doggy doo” with so many misstatements that Biden wouldn’t look good.

“I want to go onstage. I can handle this,” Biden told her, according to Pelosi’s account Wednesday.

“I know you can handle it,” she responded, noting that Trump skipped debates in the GOP primary. “Why should you debate him?”

“He wanted to do it, he felt confident,” she said.

On the day of the debate, she told other Democrats that they should expect “the Joe Biden of the State of the Union address,” the successful March speech to Congress that boosted their spirits.

Instead, she said, “Right away there was something disconcerting or concerning.”

Pelosi found what she described as the wanness of his face to be troubling. She did not expect to see such a poor performance given her interactions with him this year.

“I mean, I was shocked the night of the debate, I was shocked. Because I never saw that,” she said. “And everybody said: Well, you must have seen that — well, no, I didn’t see it.”