Minnesota Governor Tim Walz assured Jon Stewart that Democrats would not adopt former GOP vice president Dick Cheney or his daughter Liz Cheney’s foreign policy despite their endorsement.
The Democratic nominee for vice president appeared on The Daily Show on Monday evening as he goes on a media blitz two weeks out from Election Day, having appeared on The View earlier in the day.
The same day, Vice President Kamala Harris toured Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan with Liz Cheney as the campaign seeks to more aggressively court Republican voters disillusioned with former president Donald Trump.
During Monday night’s show, Stewart initially pointed to the fact that Walz is a hunter and alluded to an infamous incident where the former vice president shot his hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face while quail hunting.
“One of the real first qualifications of being a vice president is obviously rifle safety,” Stewart joked. “I can't think of a vice president in recent memory that used, used a shotgun irresponsibly.”
Stewart, who spent many years mocking the former vice president during George W Bush’s administration, asked Walz why he and Kamala Harris needed to tout the Republican father-daughter duo’s endorsement.
“The Cheney thing, do we really have to do that?” he asked.
In response, Walz pointed to the widespread support the Harris campaign has.
“It goes broader than that. Look, Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, Taylor Swift,” Walz said, to which Stewart stopped him.
“You can't ‘Dick Cheney or Taylor Swift,’” he said. “What country did Taylor Swift get us to invade?”
In response, Walz noted that the Harris campaign and the Cheneys don’t need to see eye to eye on all matters to both want to beat Donald Trump.
“It doesn't mean they agree with us,” he said. “We're not going to take their foreign policy decisions and discussions, you know, and implement those.”
That led Stewart to prod.
“Promise?” he asked, which led to laughter.
The former vice president and former two-term congresswoman have become outspoken critics of Trump ever since the January 6 Capitol riot. Liz Cheney was one of ten Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote to impeach Trump. She also served as the vice chairwoman of the House’s select committee investigating the January 6 riot. She later lost her role as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference because of her continued critiques of Trump and the Republican Party. Trump and then-House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy later endorsed a challenger to Cheney in Wyoming’s Republican primary, which she then lost.
During Monday night’s show, Walz also went on to tell Stewart that he had met several Republicans who simply “want to find a reason to not vote for Donald Trump.”
“I know it’s hard to imagine, there’s a lot of folks who are still deciding what they’re gonna do,” he said. “The folks I’m talking to, they’re probably — they are Republicans, and they say it.”
Walz recounted meeting a Republican in Omaha who told him: “‘I can’t stand with this guy anymore. That’s not the party of Reagan. This isn’t freedom.’”
Walz explained: “These are folks that want to find a reason to not vote for Donald Trump. We need to give them that.”
