(Mason City) Donald Trump is campaigning on Saturday in Iowa with two rallies, three years to the day after the assault on the Capitol in Washington, a historic event that divided American voters.
The Midwestern state is organizing its caucuses on Monday, January 15, which kick off the 2024 Republican primaries, giving it oversized weight in the American presidential campaign for half a century.
The Republican, who dreams of returning to the White House in November despite his four criminal charges, will face the judgment of voters in eight days for the first time since his resounding departure from the presidency of the United States on January 20 2021.
Without saying a word about the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6 three years ago, Donald Trump arrived Friday in “the great state of Iowa” where he is scheduled to speak at a rally on Saturday at 1 p.m. in Newton, near the capital Des Moines, then in a school in Clinton, on the Illinois border.
In the town of Sioux Center on Friday, the billionaire and political tribune accused President Joe Biden, “Joe-the-Scum,” of “stoking fears” after a “pathetic campaign” speech in Pennsylvania, where the Democrat from 81 compared the 77-year-old Republican’s rhetoric to that of “Nazi Germany.”
PHOTO ANDREW HARNIK, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Donald Trump in Sioux Center on Friday
“Most important vote”
“In ten days, the people of this state will cast the most important vote of their lives,” said Mr. Trump, judging the context and the challenges of 2024 “even more” compelling than during his victorious 2016 campaign.
Despite his legal setbacks and the risk of prison for the attempt to overturn the results of the November 2020 presidential election, polls credit Donald Trump with 60% of the Republican vote against his main opponents, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.
An unprecedented advance.
Because in Iowa and in a number of conservative states in the country, the septuagenarian, who has shaken up the American political landscape in less than ten years, has a very loyal base who brushes aside his escapades and his legal troubles. .
PHOTO RACHEL MUMMEY, REUTERS
Donald Trump supporters gathered in Mason City on Friday
“Political violence”
The unprecedented attack on the temple of American democracy, the Capitol, just three years ago, remains a subject of deep division in the United States: a quarter of Americans and 44% of Trumpist voters think, without proof, that the federal police (FBI) are at the origin, according to a survey by Washington Post and the University of Maryland released this week.
“Trump and his MAGA supporters [Make America Great Again, slogan de Donald Trump] not only condone political violence but they laugh about it,” Joe Biden lamented on Friday.
To judge the pressure that Mr. Trump allegedly exerted to try to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, a criminal trial is due to begin on March 4 in Washington.
This will be on the eve of one of the biggest deadlines in the Republican primaries: “Super Tuesday” in around fifteen states: Texas, California… but also Colorado and Maine.
The latter two states declared him ineligible for the presidency because of his actions during the assault on the Capitol. The Supreme Court took up this matter on Friday, even if, while waiting for it to decide, Donald Trump’s name remains on the ballot papers for the primary.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his campaign team intend to denounce the role of their rival by broadcasting a one-minute TV clip with shocking images of the assault on the Capitol, where the results of the election were then certified. November 2020 election.
The leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives at the time, Nancy Pelosi, castigated Friday in an article in the magazine The Atlantic the “resort to insurrection” by Donald Trump. Three years later, “the threat against our democracy is real”, warned the elected official.