Donald Trump is campaigning on Saturday in Iowa with two meetings, three years to the day after the assault on the Capitol in Washington, a historic event which divided American voters. The small 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 being re-elected in November and returning to the White House on January 20, 2025 despite his four criminal charges, will face voters in eight days for the first time since his resounding departure from the presidency of the UNITED STATES. Without saying a word about the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump has been in “the great state of Iowa” since Friday evening where he is due to speak at a meeting on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT) 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 tribune accused President Joe Biden, “Joe-the-Scum,” of “stoking fears” after a “pathetic campaign” speech in Pennsylvania, where the 81-year-old Democrat years compared the 77-year-old Republican’s rhetoric to that of “Nazi Germany.”
Donald Trump, favorite with Republican voters
He attacked the mandate of his successor (2021-2025) as “an uninterrupted series of weakness, incompetence, corruption and failure”. “The people of this state are going to make the most important vote of their lives,” said Donald Trump, judging the context and the challenges of 2024 “even more” compelling than during his victory in November 2016. Despite his setbacks legal and the risk of prison for his attempts to reverse 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 which brushes aside his escapades and his legal troubles. The attack on the temple of American democracy, the Capitol where Congress sits, 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 the Washington Post and the University of Maryland.
The former president still considers that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him
This same FBI announced on Saturday the arrest in Florida of three people for their participation in January 6. In 35 months of a sprawling investigation still ongoing, authorities have charged more than 1,200 people in almost all 50 American states. More than half were convicted. “Trump and his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) supporters not only condone political violence, but they laugh about it,” Joe Biden lamented on Friday.
But Donald Trump denies having incited his supporters to attack the Capitol, even if he still considers that the November 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him. So to judge the pressure he would have exerted to try to reverse the results, a criminal trial must 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 in December due to his actions on January 6, 2021. The Supreme Court took up this case on Friday, even if, while waiting for it to decide in February, the name Trump remains on the primary ballot. Joe Biden and his campaign team continue to denounce their rival’s desire to “sacrifice (the) democracy” by broadcasting a TV clip with shocking images of the assault on the Capitol, where the results of the 2020 presidential election were then certified.
The leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives at the time, Nancy Pelosi, castigated Friday the “resort to insurrection” by Donald Trump. Three years later, “the threat against our democracy is real”, warned the elected official, while her successor in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, demanded on Saturday that those responsible for the “atrocious events” of January 6 be brought to justice. justice.