WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Former President Donald Trump stormed back into Iowa Thursday with an urgent message for voters in the kickoff caucus state: I’m here to win.
The frontrunner Republican — by far — in the Republican presidential nomination chase made several campaign stops in the Des Moines metropolitan area. But this latest swing through Iowa found Trump eschewing his usual massive campaign rallies for more intimate venues with smaller crowds, perhaps a recognition that winning in the first-in-the-nation caucus state will require the kind of face-to-face retail politics Iowans have grown accustomed to.
The former president began an action-packed day at Urbandale’s Machine Shed, a restaurant that stands as an homage to farming and rural life. He addressed a packed gathering of the Westside Conservative Club, a power player in right-of-center politics in Iowa’s capital city.
He had lunch with area faith leaders, key to Iowa’s strong evangelical vote, at the First Church of the Open Bible in Des Moines. And then Trump surprised volunteers in Grimes, a suburban city of nearly 17,000 people 12 miles northwest of Des Moines. He capped the day in Clive, another rapidly growing Des Moines suburb, with a town hall on Fox News, hosted by his old pal Sean Hannity.
Trump, as he frequently does, boasted of his successes in his first term, made big promises of what he would accomplish in a second, and made time to bash his closest rival in the GOP contest, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
“Someone said, ‘Why don’t you be nicer.’ I said, ‘Because we have to win,’” Trump told campaign volunteers. “It’s not a game. We’re trying to save our country.”
DeSantis, in Iowa Tuesday and Wednesday for his first campaign events since officially entering the race last week, was campaigning in first primary state New Hampshire on Thursday.
In Urbandale, Trump picked up on DeSantis’ comments earlier this week that he’ll need two terms in the White House to clean up the mess that President Joe Biden and friends have made over the past two-plus years, and the swamp has made for decades. Trump pledged to have the “comeback” going strong within six months of of taking the oath of office.
“When he says eight years, every time I hear it I wince because I say, “If it takes eight years to turn this around then you don’t want him as president,” Trump said. “You ought to go to the third or fourth or fifth guy [in the GOP candidate field], but they’re usually polling at 1 percent.”
The latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump with a commanding lead, at 53 percent-plus support among Republican primary voters — nearly 31 percentage points ahead of DeSantis (22.4 percent). The top 5 include former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (4.4 percent), Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence (3.8 percent), and Ohio businessman and political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy (2.6 percent). Ramaswamy and Haley have basically camped out in Iowa since launching their campaigns in February, and they’ve gotten some traction for their efforts. Pence is expected to announce his run for the White House next week.
“There’s no way we lose Iowa,” Trump said.
He certainly has had success in the Hawkeye State.
Trump won Iowa by more than 9 percentage points in 2016 and by more than 8 in 2020. But he came in second to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the 2016 caucuses.
Trump took plenty of questions from Iowa voters, many of whom proudly noted that they are kicking the tires on each of the candidates parading through.
A new high school graduate with a $120,000 scholarship awaiting her at Yale asked the former president what he thought about all of the “attacks on education, censorship,” parental control and school choice.
“I’m very big on school choice,” Trump said. “Can you imagine we actually have to talk about parental control and having parents get involved. We have school systems that don’t even want to talk to parents about their children.”
He added, “The country has gone sick.”
“We have to bring common sense back into the country,” Trump said, expanding on the point. “People say, ‘You’re a conservative.’ I say, ‘Yeah, I’m a conservative, but more important is, I’m a person with common sense and so are the people in this room.’” He scored plenty of applause for that last line. “Our country needs common sense back in leadership.”
Trump hammered home why common sense is uncommon in Biden, his political rival in 2020 and the guy he would likely compete against again next year should he come out on top of the GOP presidential field.
While Trump was campaigning in Iowa, Biden was falling down in Colorado Springs, CO. The octogenarian president “took a dramatic spill Thursday while passing out diplomas to graduates after giving the commencement address at the Air Force Academy.”
“He actually fell down? Well, I hope he wasn’t hurt,” Trump said when asked about Biden’s spill during a campaign stop. “That’s a bad place to fall… that’s not inspiring,” he added.
Trump’s core campaign message is similar to that of DeSantis and many of the other Republicans running for president. There’s a grave sense of urgency about the damage done by leftists in the White House, in congress and in America’s largest cities.
“We’re at a crossroads,” Trump told volunteers. “If we keep going like this we’re going to be Venezuela on steroids.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Background Photo “Donald Trump” by Dan Scavino Jr.
