WATCH: Tim Walz’s Tiananmen Square Lie Gets the SNL Treatment: ‘So I Think What Happened Is, I Went to EPCOT’
Saturday Night Live skewered Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz for lying about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The skit re-creates a question posed to Walz on the lie during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate. Walz, played by comedian Jim Gaffigan, blames the fib on a drunken trip to EPCOT.
“Governor Walz, you claimed you were in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when you were home in Minnesota,” says SNL’s Heidi Gardner, playing CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell. “Can you explain that?”
“So I think what happened is, I went to EPCOT,” Gaffigan’s Walz responds. “You can go around the whole world, and I had a couple in the Germany section. And I thought I went to China.”
“Anyway, I’m a knucklehead.”
Walz has repeatedly claimed he was in Hong Kong during the student protests that culminated in the June 1989 massacre. Contemporaneous newspaper articles reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, however, show he didn’t travel to Hong Kong and China until months later. A subsequent CNN report found that Walz repeated the lie as recently as a 2019 radio interview.
“I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened,” Walz said at the time.
The real Walz addressed the lie by calling himself a “knucklehead” who “misspoke.”
“I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he said during the VP debate. “I got [to Hong Kong] that summer, and I misspoke on this.”
Walz was also pressed on his various “misstatements,” including his false claim that his kids were “born through” in-vitro fertilization, during a Sunday interview with Fox News’s Shannon Bream. He responded by saying he does not think “people care.”
WATCH: ‘You called yourself a knucklehead…” — Fox News’ @ShannonBream confronts Tim Walz with list of his ‘misstatements”
His response: “I don’t think people care.” pic.twitter.com/1z30YksYti
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) October 6, 2024
“I gotta be honest with you, Shannon, I don’t think people care whether I used IUI or IVF when we talk about this,” Walz said. “Look, I speak passionately.”
