Donald Trump tells cheering Iowa rally he’ll allow gasoline engines in cars if re-elected in 2024 but will ban gender-affirming care for trans kids, which he calls ‘child sexual mutilation’

In an effort to secure Iowa, former US President Donald Trump promised at a cheering rally in Iowa that he would allow gasoline engines if re-elected in 2024 but would ban “sexual mutilation of children.”

“Under a Trump administration, gasoline engines will be allowed – but child sexual mutilation will be banned, if that’s okay with you,” he told the crowd.

As with his other recent trips to the leading caucus state, Trump campaigned in an area that previously supported Democrats.

Trump headlined an afternoon event in Ottumwa, where 2,500 people filled the inside of an event hall at the Bridge View Center in Ottumwa.

The small city is a hub in eastern Iowa and the seat of Wapello County, one of 31 counties that Trump held in 2016 and that Democrat Barack Obama won four years earlier.

A ban on gender-affirming care, which Trump called “child sexual mutilation,” went into effect in Iowa in late September.

Supporters of the law have argued that minors are too young to make “potentially irreversible decisions” about medical care, according to media reports.

While some say gender dysphoria is a ‘temporary phase’ that children grow out of.

Amid a national push for transgender care for children, Republican leaders in Iowa passed Senate File 538, which bans Iowa doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or gender confirmation surgery to transgender people under the age of 18.

Rep. Steve Holt, R-Denison, said the bill protects Iowa children from permanent changes they may later regret.

He and other Republican supporters of the bill argued that there is not enough data to support gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

“We thought it was extremely important to protect children against this,” Holt told the media.

“Again, once someone turns 18, if they want to look at the data and make a decision, they can do that.

“But we believe the data clearly showed that it was appropriate for us to protect minor children from these procedures.”

Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the law on March 22, giving doctors six months to wean patients off puberty blockers or hormones they provided to transgender youth before the ban took effect on September 18.

Gender-affirming care refers to medical interventions that confirm the identity of a transgender person.

Trump’s comments come during his second trip to the region in two weeks, where he drew large crowds during his campaign.

Trump hopes he can muster voter support in the Jan. 15 caucuses, where more than a half-dozen other Republicans are vying to emerge as a threat to his popularity within the party.

“With your support on Monday, January 15, we will win the caucuses in a historic landslide,” Trump told the packed event hall on Sunday.

Trump is expected to return to the Waterloo and Cedar Rapids areas next week.

Trump, the first Republican to carry the county since the Eisenhower administration, campaigned in northeastern Iowa the week before.

There he drew about 1,400 to rural Jackson County along the Mississippi River and nearly 2,000 to Dubuque County to the north. Like Wapello, Dubuque County was a Democratic stronghold for decades before 2016.

While aides said they were not specifically targeting counties that Trump flipped in 2016, they noted that he has had success in eastern Iowa, where manufacturing has declined sharply over the past two decades.

His administration’s renegotiations of the U.S. trade agreement with Canada and Mexico remain popular.

Rick Anderson and his wife Nancy, who entered the room, are the kind of voters Trump’s campaign would like to convince to vote for the candidate on January 15.

They used to vote Democratic, but switched to support Trump in 2016. They have not attended Republican precinct meetings in Iowa in the past.

Anderson, a retired union millwright who owns a small business with his wife, is one of several longtime union members who kept Wapello County and others in Iowa’s once-robust eastern manufacturing corridor running reliably Democratic until Trump.

‘We like what he says. He says, “Drill, baby, drill,” and that touches my heart. Because that’s what’s wrong with the country: energy. Solve that problem and you solve so many other problems,” Anderson said.

“Democrats have lost touch with people like us.”

As Trump maintains a strong lead in Iowa, his Republican rivals are scrambling for support, hoping a strong performance can help them consolidate non-Trump support.

However, recent polling from Five Thirty Eight shows him still with a strong lead with 55.1 percentage points compared to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is in second place with 13.5 percent.

Trump volunteers at the site held clipboards full of pledge cards and asked attendees if they would commit to supporting Trump during the caucuses.

Trump arrived in Iowa after a two-day trip to California, where he collected 6 million of his 74 million votes in 2020, losing the state to Democrat Joe Biden by 30 percentage points.

In a fiery speech that delighted Republicans dejected after decades of Democratic control, Trump escalated his longstanding tough-on-crime message with calls for violent retaliation against criminals.

People caught robbing stores should be shot, Trump said to applause.

He raised money during his trip to Orange County, once a bastion of conservatism in Southern California that has become increasingly competitive.

As Trump’s would-be Republican challengers sparred in the second primary debate earlier this week, Trump found himself in another key working-class region in Michigan’s general election battleground.

Trump spoke at the debate Wednesday night in Macomb County, Michigan, north of Detroit, at a non-union factory, where he criticized Biden’s push for electric cars amid an auto worker strike.

Trump carried Macomb County twice, after Obama did so in 2008 and 2012.