WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — The Trump campaign made it clear in a “Keep Iowa Great” press conference Monday afternoon they are not conceding an inch of territory to the Democrats in the Hawkeye State or anywhere else in the country.
Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, his wife Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, all spoke in support of the re-election of President Trump.
Donald Trump Jr. focused on the president’s track record of success, all accomplished despite “zero help” from the other side and a “double standard” from the media.
“We’ve gotten used to the double standard of the media. We’ve gotten used to their lies. No one has ever held them accountable until Trump,” Trump noted.
“Today we have a real team. Today we have real results. In 2016 my father said ‘vote for me. What do you have to lose?’ He was right. ”
Until Donald Trump, he went on to say:
…no one actually did the things they ran on. When did that become the anomoly? A politician who would actually do all of the things he said he was going to do. … To have a track record of success, despite exactly zero help from the other side, who is frankly far more concerned about making sure that Trump fails than they are doing anything, let alone representing their own constituency.
Trump added:
There’s never been incoming like this of a president, and there’s also never been results. But imagine what would happen when the American people go out to vote on November 3 and send a mandate back to Congress and all the lunatics on the left who’ve been taken over by the commie division of the party and say ‘we want you to actually get things done.’
A bearded protester in a white sweater attempted to interrupt Trump as he began his speech. The protester shouting incoherently about President Trump’s foreign policy and was removed by half a dozen security team members.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale focused on the organizational strength of the Trump campaign in 2020.
“This is the first test of our a grassroots machine that we’ve built,” Brad Parscale said, adding that the campaign has eighty surrogates working in Iowa and around the country.
A number of those surrogates were in attendance, including Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), Mike Lindell, inventor and CEO of My Pillow, and former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.
While the contested Democratic caucuses in the first-in-the-nation electoral contest on the path to the November 2020 presidential election have grabbed all the attention, Donald Trump, Jr. made it clear the president intends to win Iowa in 2020 by an even wider margin than he did in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton by ten points, 52 percent to 42 percent.
Republicans in Iowa are also holding caucuses on Monday night, and President Trump is virtually uncontested. There are even reports that he may garner a few “first alignment” votes in the evening’s Democratic caucuses. The 1,600 Democratic caucuses will begin around 7:00 p.m. and final results are expected to be reported around 11:00 p.m. central time.
Whatever the outcome in Monday night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses, Republicans in the state are united behind President Trump and are committed to winning the state’s six electoral college votes in November.
As Tim Alberta reported at Politico on Monday, Democrats, while keenly watching the results of their party’s caucuses tonight, have written the state off to the Republicans in the general election:
Iowa’s place at the molten core of the political universe has, for much of the past half-century, owed to the marriage of its first-in-the-nation nominating contest with the state’s reputation as a quintessential general-election battleground. The swinging of Iowa’s electoral votes between the two parties, and the tight margins by which those contests have often been decided, guaranteed the state would be just as relevant in October as it was in January.
That won’t be the case this year. A new sentiment has echoed throughout recent conversations with Democratic strategists, activists and campaigns, a consensus that would have been unthinkable just eight years ago: Iowa is no longer a battleground. Not in 2020, anyway.
After decades spent at the center of both parties’ strategies for winning the Electoral College, Iowa is suddenly an afterthought. Its six electoral votes no longer seem essential, not when states like Texas and Arizona and Georgia — longtime GOP strongholds — all were decided by tighter margins in 2016, and all have demographic tailwinds that benefit the Democratic Party.
About 300 Trump supporters attended the event, held in the main ball room of the Sheraton Hotel in West Des Moines. About 100 members of the media were also in attendance.