A campaign speech by Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz, in which she used a sweeping hand gesture to say “bye bye” and “turn the page” on former President Trump energized a Wisconsin audience, but induced cringes elsewhere.
Gwen Walz was slammed as the “living embodiment of Trump Derangement Syndrome” for a stump speech for her husband, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Vice President Kamala Harris in Wisconsin on Saturday.
In the speech, Gwen Walz cited Harris’ debate performance last week and how she repeatedly said the election is the time to “turn the page” on the current political climate.
“Now you probably saw that debate the other night. Yeah, that was great. And what Kamala Harris told us we had to do, was we had to turn the page. Yeah, because we have something really exciting headed in our direction,” Gwen Walz said.
“But I kinda like when she did this,” Minnesota’s first lady continued, imitating someone turning the page of a book. “Turn the page.”
Gwen Walz then asked the audience to join her in pantomiming turning the page, while declaring the Democratic Party has “52 days to turn the page” on Trump’s run for the White House.
“You know what else that looks like?” Walz asked as she continued moving her arms around. “Bye, bye. Bye bye, Donald Trump,” she exclaimed.
“We are turning the page,” she added.
Critics quickly slammed Gwen Walz and her speech as “cringe” and “1000x worse than Hillary Clinton.”
Gwen Walz is a Minnesota teacher who met her husband when they both worked as educators in the 1990s.
She has served as the Gopher State’s first lady since 2019, when Tim Walz was sworn in as governor.
Gwen Walz previously set social media ablaze this election cycle after an unearthed clip went viral of her describing how she handled the 2020 Minnesota riots.
“Again we had more sleepless nights during the riots,” Walz’s wife told KSTP in July 2020. “I could smell the burning tires, and that was a very real thing. And I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.”
Critics and conservatives at the time slammed the remarks as “bizarre” on social media.
“What might you call this? Bizarre? Abnormal? Peculiar? Eccentric? Offbeat? Quirky?” wrote Noah Rothman, a senior writer at the National Review Online. “Gotta be a word that describes reveling in the catharsis represented by the torching of other people’s property.”
