Trump says Iowa will ‘no way’ vote against him if he messes up city name during state campaign stop

Donald Trump has predicted he will win the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa in January, brushing aside his advisers’ caution not to exaggerate expectations.

The former president’s confidence came Sunday despite greeting his Iowa audiences in Sioux City with the wrong name. He named the location “Sioux Falls,” which is actually a city in South Dakota.

“I always say we’re going to win Iowa. My people said you can’t assume that,” Trump told his audience at the ornate Orpheum Theater in Sioux City, Iowa.

“Iowa is absolutely not voting against Trump,” he said, noting the economic benefits to farm states from the tariffs his administration imposed on China.

And yet, as Trump took the stage, he warmly greeted a city more than 80 miles north, and across the state line, from South Dakota. He said, “Hello to a place where we have done very well, Sioux Falls. Thank you.’

A few minutes later he realized the blunder and corrected himself.

It was Trump’s eighth campaign event in Iowa in just over a month, part of the former president’s accelerated fall schedule ahead of the nation’s first caucuses in January.

Trump’s speech in Sioux City, the heart of Republican-ridden western Iowa, followed last month’s events in eastern and central Iowa, where he has drawn thousands of people as his team has tried to create a more organized campaign than in 2016.

At the time, Trump – a celebrity and real estate mogul – was unfamiliar with the process.

While Trump has spent months attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the former president on Sunday stepped up his criticism of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a member of Trump’s Cabinet, as she has sparked new curiosity among Republicans in Iowa and has caused a surge in the polls.

Trump mocked Haley, who is also the former governor of South Carolina, for saying after leaving her post at the United Nations that she would not run for president if Trump did so in 2024.

Giving her the derogatory nickname “bird brain,” he described Haley as “a highly overrated person.”

Trump further suggested that one reason he appointed Haley to his Cabinet when she was still governor was to help Henry McMaster, then-lieutenant governor of South Carolina and a devout Trump supporter, become governor.

“I liked it,” Trump said. “I got two for the price of one.”

Trump’s sharper criticism of Haley, which focused not on her performance in his Cabinet but on disloyalty to him, came a day after she criticized him for praising foreign strongmen and warned that his style of “chaos, vendettas and drama would be dangerous.

Although Haley has used the implicit criticism of Trump for months without mentioning him by name as she campaigned in early voting states, her sharpest criticism of the former president came Saturday when she spoke before the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual meeting in Las Vegas.

Before taking the stage in Sioux City, Trump was endorsed by Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who unsuccessfully sought the 2016 Republican nomination but who later served in Trump’s Cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson’s endorsement may not seem remarkable as a member of his Cabinet. However, some members have left the Trump administration, including Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, in the wake of the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Both officials cited Trump’s actions on the day of the violent attack as the reason for their resignations.

In August, Trump made a grand entrance at the Iowa State Fair, overshadowing Ron DeSantis and other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination who sought to counter the former president’s power.

Trump, who is leading DeSantis, his closest rival, by double digits in the polls, told DailyMail.com that the Florida governor should drop out of the race.

“Not many people showed up,” Trump said of DeSantis. ‘That is not good. He is doing very poorly in the polls. Very, very bad. And I think he’ll leave the race soon, I think.”

When asked if he would debate DeSantis, Trump replied: “He really should get out of the race.”

The former president arrived in the grandeur that only Trump can bring.

Trump Force One flew low over the fairgrounds for the crowd to see. The Secret Service wandered through a long line of people waiting to enter Steers & Steins to see the former president. Gangs followed him across the fairgrounds shouting his name.

During his speech to supporters that day, Trump mocked the other contenders at the fair – in addition to DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy were campaigning in Iowa.

And in early October, Trump once again promised a cheering rally in Iowa that he would allow gasoline engines if re-elected in 2024, but that he 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 stormed the inside of an event hall at the Bridge View Center.

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