Gov. Tim Walz, in his first Sunday show appearance and just the fourth national media interview to air since he was elected to replace Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the growing pile of false statements that have emerged since he joined the Democratic Party an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Fox’s Shannon Bream asked the governor why he thinks the American people should trust him in the face of falsehoods – about his stay in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, about his military service and about him and his woman underwent in vitro fertilization, despite the falsehoods, actually used intrauterine insemination – as he could be in the line of succession for commander in chief should Harris win in November.

The factual inaccuracies amassed by Walz came to a head during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate with Republican candidate JD Vance. Walz called himself a “knucklehead” for making these mistakes, then made another faux pas during the broadcast.

When discussing gun control, he said he was “friends with school shooters,” rather than saying he was friends with school shooting victims — something he later tried to clarify in a conversation with the media: “I was a member of The Sandy Hook Parents Convention was a profound movement. “David Hogg is a good friend of mine,” Walz said.

Walz said Sunday that he believes the country “heard” him in his cleanup during the debate and that he is not afraid to own up when he makes a mistake – suggesting that those falsehoods are better than telling people “denigrate”. Like former President Donald Trump does, or he denies the results of the 2020 election like Vance.

“Well, I think you heard me. “You heard me talking passionately the other night about gun violence and misunderstandings,” Walz said, saying at the time that he thought people didn’t care whether he used IUI or IVF, even though Trump could jeopardize both fertility treatments if he returned to the White House.

“Look, I speak passionately. I had an entire career ahead of me for decades before holding public office… I have never disparaged anyone else on this matter. But I know that’s not what Donald Trump is doing. They denigrate everyone who makes personal attacks. I will admit when I misspeak, I will admit when I make a mistake,” Walz said in the Fox interview on Sunday.

“Let’s be clear: The other night I asked a very simple question on this debate stage, and Senator Vance was not going to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. I think they’re probably a lot more worried about it than my wife and I used IUI to have our child, and that Donald Trump would restrict that,” he continued.

Walz’s response to his sloppiness with facts has been refined in the days since the debate. Speaking to reporters the day after the broadcast, he attempted to clarify the question of exactly when he was in China in 1989, a topic that came to the surface last week with reports that he had apparently falsely claimed he was during of the year in Hong Kong was the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of the same year.

“Yes, you see, I got the dates wrong,” he admitted on Sunday. During the debate, he didn’t want to be so direct: “All I said about it was that I got there this summer and I got it wrong on this matter, so I’ll just say what I said… So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests,” he said.

Speaking at a fundraiser in Cleveland on Saturday, Walz also directly addressed recent reports that he had mistold certain stories, twisting the character arc in a way that criticized the Trump-Vance ticket for the 2025 project.

“When I work with high school kids, I talk really fast and then I say, ‘I’m putting my foot in my mouth – I have to go back and correct it again,'” Walz said.

“So I once said: You don’t have a plan. That is untrue. I made a mistake there. You definitely have a plan. It’s called Project 2025,” he continued.

Walz’s “Fox News Sunday” interview comes as the Harris-Walz campaign said the governor would step up his relatively quiet national media strategy in a post-debate blitz. He also recorded an interview about Harris for the CBS election show “60 Minutes.” He will appear on the late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Monday.