Former President Donald Trump will go to Iowa on Monday for the first time since announcing his third run for the White House. This comes as prosecutors in Manhattan are close to making a decision about whether or not to charge him in a hush money scheme and cover-up.
His trip to the important state, which holds the first GOP primary of 2024, comes after trips by potential and announced primary challengers, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made his Iowa debut on Friday, and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who campaigned in the state last week as a declared candidate.
At this early stage of the campaign, DeSantis is seen as Trump’s biggest potential rival for the Republican nomination. He plans to make a formal announcement about his political future in May or June. But his trip to Iowa and his stop Saturday in Nevada, where early voting was going on, made it clear what he planned to do.
DeSantis didn’t mention Trump by name when he was in Davenport, Iowa, to promote his new book. However, he did compare his administration in Florida to the chaos and leaks that sometimes surrounded the Trump White House.
DeSantis said-
“There’s no drama in our administration”
“There’s no palace intrigue. (My staffers)
basically just sit back and say, ‘OK, what’s the governor going to do next?’ And we roll out and we execute.” A person who knows about the speech says that Trump will talk on Monday in Davenport about his education plan for 2024, as well as trade, energy, and agriculture.
Education has become a political flashpoint, and next year’s presidential election is likely to be all about it. Trump has called for schools that teach “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content to our children” to lose federal funding. He has said that parents should “directly elect” school principals and has threatened to cut off federal funding for schools that teach “a child that they could be stuck in the wrong body” if he wins another term.
In Davenport, Trump is also expected to tout the $28 billion in federal aid his administration paid out to farmers who were hurt by his trade war with China as he tries to appeal to the key Iowa agricultural industry, the person familiar with the speech said.
Trump attacked DeSantis on his Truth Social platform before his speech because DeSantis voted for a 2017 bill that would have ended a federal program that requires transportation fuel to have a certain amount of renewable fuels, like ethanol, which is a big industry in Iowa.
But Trump has a mixed record on ethanol. When he was president, farmers were upset with him because he gave small refineries temporary waivers from laws that say they have to mix biofuels like ethanol into their gasoline. In response, leaders of groups of corn farmers wrote a letter to Trump saying that the waivers had hurt the demand for their crops.
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Research cloud
Trump’s campaign stop in Iowa comes after prosecutors in Manhattan asked him to appear before a grand jury. This is the clearest sign yet that a decision on whether to charge him could be made soon. The investigation is about a $130,000 payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in late October 2016, just days before that year’s presidential election, to keep her from talking about an alleged affair she had with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has said that he and Daniels did not have an affair.
Michael Cohen used to be Trump’s personal lawyer. On Friday, he met with people from the office of the Manhattan district attorney. If Trump were to be charged, he would be the first former president and the first major presidential candidate to be charged. He is still stubborn in the face of the Manhattan investigation and several other federal and state probes. He has said that if he were indicted, he “wouldn’t even think about leaving” the 2024 race.
Trump told his supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the beginning of this month-
“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your punishment.”
Trump’s plan for Iowa
Trump’s campaign operation and strategy are starting to take shape. Last month, he announced his first team hires for the Iowa caucuses. They included Eric Branstad, son of former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, and state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, son of Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann.
The people working on Trump’s campaign know that they have a lot of work to do in a state where a win or a loss could set the tone for the whole primary season. But Trump’s team thinks they will have an advantage over other 2024 candidates because of the information they’ve gathered about Iowans, both rally-goers and donors, during the dozens of times Trump has visited the state since the start of his first presidential campaign in 2015.
One Trump adviser told CNN, “Caucuses are won by organization on a precinct level—about it’s finding the people and getting them to the polls—and that’s what we plan to do.” He also said that in the coming months, the team would go through this data to find potential Trump voters and their precincts and make sure their voter registrations are up to date.
Trump will probably need to do more to reach out to evangelical Christian voters, who helped him win the state in 2016 and 2020. He did this earlier this year when he criticized religious conservatives who didn’t back his third presidential run.
“Nobody has ever done more for Right to Life than Donald Trump. I put three Supreme Court justices, who all voted, and they got something that they’ve been fighting for 64 years, for many, many years,’”
Trump told conservative journalist David Brody in a January podcast interview, referring to the Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last summer. “There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics, and that’s a sign of disloyalty.”
Bob Vander Plaats, president of the influential Christian group The Family Leader, told CNN that the political climate of 2024 was different from that of 2016 and that “people are more interested in a vision for the future than a complaint about the past.”
He said-
“The people in the faith community are very grateful for Trump and his presidency but their loyalty is to one, and that’s not Trump, it’s to God”
“It’s not just people of faith – Americans are looking to turn the page. There’s a point where people are just exhausted with former President Trump.”
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