Tim Walz: One of Trump's angry tweets 'brought armed people to my house'

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz three years ago opened up to journalists Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin about his relationship with former President Donald Trump.

However, the two journalists never published the interview with Walz -- until Wednesday, when his ascension to the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for vice president gave it renewed public interest.

During the interview, Walz was asked about working with Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic when governors across the country needed resources to deal with an unprecedented public health crisis.

Although Trump was initially on board with some of the restrictions on activities that states were taking in response to the crisis, he soon began behaving erratically and sent out all-caps tweets with messages such as "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" and "LIBERATE MINNESOTA!"

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Walz was then asked about the impact the tweets had on his state.

"It brought armed people to my house," Walz revealed. "It certainly ratcheted up the social media side of things and put the security folks a little more on high alert, but not all that much."

Walz did not call out Trump publicly at the time, however, because he worried that Trump would then go out of his way to punish his state.

"My relationship was based on pragmatism, understanding that it was very clear that President Trump was going to do what President Trump is going to do," he said. "And that many times what he was saying, you need to make sure you verify what was actually going to come out of that. So I took an approach that there was absolutely zero upside to engaging."

However, Walz said he privately asked Trump to tone down his rhetoric -- but he wasn't sure that he got through to him.

"The president’s communication style was that I sometimes wondered if he actually heard me," Walz said in the interview. "There was actually one time where I said my daughter is sitting right next to me, Mr. President, could she say hi? And what I was trying to do is for him to maybe engage on a personal basis with that. [My children] both had to get off social media because they get threats, we have people directly threatening them. I said that there are real-world implications. I said I know that you care deeply about your children, I care deeply about mine, anything we could do to maybe separate that stuff. I never got a direct answer, but I think he heard."