Democratic Gov. Tim Walz denounced President Donald Trump on Thursday for calling Minnesota’s Somali community “garbage” and dismissing the state as a “hellhole.”

Walz said Trump slandered all Minnesotans and that his expressions of contempt for the state's Somali community — the largest in the U.S. — were “unprecedented for a United States president. We’ve got little children going to school today who their president called them garbage.”

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Republican legislative leaders stopped short of accepting the governor's invitation to join him in condemnation, and countered that the dispute wouldn’t have erupted if Walz had acted more effectively to prevent fraud in social service programs.

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