Tim Walz’s Mom Fights to Keep Peace Between Him and His Trumpy Brother

Tim Walz ’s mother, Darlene Walz, is not interfering in the rift between her son, who is running for vice president, and his brother, the Trump supporter who has become a thorn in the side of the Harris-Walz campaign.

“I want to keep peace with all of them,” Walz, 89, said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast Wednesday from her home in Butte, Nebraska, which she called a “spot in the road in the middle of nowhere.”

Walz confirmed her two sons’ estrangement and that a pro-Trump photo that went viral online Wednesday featured “mostly second cousins” from Nebraska on her late husband's side of the family posing for what passed for an endorsement photo, nominally lending the Walz family name.

Walz said she wants her son and Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump and JD Vance—she predicted they will win and that her son, the Minnesota governor, “will become vice president”—but she doesn’t want to meddle in her two children’s knotty relationship.

Darlene Walz is a lifelong Democrat who campaigned with her son when he successfully ran for Congress, barnstormed “every town in Minnesota” when he ran for governor and attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to see her son, Tim, accept his party’s nomination for vice president. “Oh man, that was a blast,” she said, her Midwestern twang rising with excitement. “It was wonderful.”

But the split between her sons Tim and Jeff Walz is too fractured and fragile, it seems, for her to try to intervene.

“I think the best thing maybe, for me, is to just stay out of it,” she told the Daily Beast.

Walz expressed love for both of her living sons. She said she recently visited her conservative son in Florida, where she said they avoided talk of politics. “We got along just fine,” she said.

Her older son, Jeff Walz, who lives in the ultra-conservative Florida panhandle town of Freeport, is being wooed by Donald Trump and the MAGA World to commit the ultimate act of political defiance against his liberal brother: They want his endorsement. The 67-year-old Walz brother admitted in a Facebook post last week, “I’ve thought long and hard about doing something like that! I’m torn between that and just keeping my family out of it.”

In one comment posted to Facebook, he said he was “100% opposed to all" of his politician brother's ideology and said Gov. Walz is “not the type of character you want making decisions about your future.”

Darlene Walz said her daughter, Sandy Dietrich, approached Jeff Walz to tone down his divisive attacks on their brother. Whatever she said to her brother seemed to worked, because on Tuesday he walked back his online diatribe against Gov. Walz, telling NewsNation on Tuesday that while he doesn’t agree with his brother’s political views, he would not seek to influence the outcome of the election.

“There is going to be no further statements to anybody, and we’re not campaigning or anything, for him or against him or anything like that,” he said.

Darlene Walz described her daughter, who also lives in Nebraska, as a “diehard Democrat.”

“Maybe somewhere down the line we’re hoping it will be resolved in a better situation,” the Minnesota governor’s mother told the Daily Beast of the relationship between her two living sons. Her third son, Craig Walz, died in 2016 when a tree fell on his campsite. All four of her children were teachers, the proud mother said.

The vice presidential nominee’s mother said the Nebraska Walz for Trump family members whose photo went viral online Wednesday are mostly “second cousins” on her late husband’s side of the family.

The photo was first posted by Charles Herbster, a Nebraska Republican who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022.

Rod Edwards, a spokesperson for Herbster, told the Associated Press that they were Walz’s second cousins.

“The family in the picture are the descendants of Francis Walz, who was brother to Tim Walz’s grandfather,” Edwards said. “They’re all Walzes and spouses.”

Trump used the photo opportunity to thank Jeff Walz for an endorsement he didn’t lend. Darlene Walz said she wasn’t surprised at all to see the Nebraska side of the Walz family beaming in the photo as they sported their custom-made Trump t-shirts.

“My in-laws were different,” she said, adding that she didn’t mean that in a negative way, noting that most families in the bitterly divided United States have both Republicans and Democrats within their folds.

“That’s OK, that’s OK,’ Darlene Walz said. Her only advice to polarized families such as her own is: “Keep your mouth shut and go vote.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.