“Who the hell wants to watch a football game? This is better,” Donald Trump told the crowd at the beginning of his speech in Iowa on Sunday afternoon. What followed was a rambling rant that ran the gamut from a 17-minute ragefest against Ron DeSantis to debating whether he’d rather die by electrocution or by shark to his impending legal issues.
“It’s no wonder the far left lunatics are getting desperate to stop our movement by any means necessary,” Trump said when complaining about his recent multiple arrests. “As you know, crooked Joe Biden and his radical left thugs have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading opponent on fake and phony charges. I got arrested four times in the last — it’s almost like I wake up in the morning, ‘Do you think they’ll arrest me today?’ I never got arrested before. It’s a terrible thing.”
“Every time the radical Democrats indict me, I consider it a great honor,” he told the crowd. “Because I’m being indicted for you.” Trump currently faces charges regarding Georgia election interference, Jan. 6, his mishandling of classified material and falsifying business records related to his hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
While pandering to Iowa farmers — some of whom were likely in the crowd of 2,500 — Trump claimed that farmers and builders who have never cried in their life are coming up to him sobbing to praise and thank him for everything he’s done for them. “They were crying, many of them crying. People that had never cried before,” he said.
“Crooked Joe is trying to crush Iowa ethanol,” Trump added before claiming President Joe Biden wants to make everyone buy electric vehicles. (Biden has no such plan. He does have a plan to make half of all new vehicles electric by 2030.)
But Trump claimed to be unimpressed by electric transit. “Let’s get in our new electric vehicle. Thirty minutes later you’re looking for a recharge,” Trump cracked before decrying electricity-powered boats. According to the Department of Energy, most currently available electric vehicles can drive between 110 and 300 miles before requiring a charge.
Trump then made an unfounded claim that the electric batteries on boats are so heavy that the boats sink. “Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on this big powerful battery. Do I get electrocuted?” Trump asked before saying he’d rather get electrocuted than be killed by a shark.
He also promised to repeal “Joe Biden’s absolutely insane, job killing electric vehicle mandate on day one.”
Moving on to the culture wars, Trump claimed that he saved Christmas. “We brought back Merry Christmas. No one fights it anymore. No one fights it,” he said. “These woke [federal] departments didn’t want to use it. We brought back Christmas. We brought back a lot of things.”
Trump next turned to complaining about helping DeSantis (whom he called “a bad seed”) get elected, then claimed he doesn’t care about him anymore because he is far behind him in the polls. The former president spent the subsequent 15-plus minutes whining about DeSantis.
“Anybody you help get elected should support you… Ten percent of the time, you help somebody a lot, then all of a sudden they go against you,” Trump said. “It’s hard to like those people but it happens.”
“I’m the one who turned Florida, he didn’t turn Florida,” Trump whined. “[DeSantis] rode my coattails.”
After mentioning DeSantis aka “DeSanctis” multiple times, Trump claimed he doesn’t name names of those who turned against him.
The former president also waxed poetic about his derogatory nicknames that he uses to label his opponents, including DeSantis. “Branding is a great thing. You brand somebody. So It’s DeSanctimonious. I’ve never said this… It’s a beautiful term, DeSanctimonious. It flows. But you sorta can use it once every two or three paragraphs,” Trump said, adding, “But the abbreviation is DeSanctis… It’s a beautiful thing. It’s actually sort of a genius thought.”
Trump next told the Iowa crowd that DeSantis is a “sworn enemy” of farmers and he will “stab you in the back like he stabbed MAGA in the back.”
In closing his remarks, Trump told his supporters that 2024 is “our final battle” before he threw some some red meat to the one in four Republicans who are also QAnon believers by promising to rid the government of the “Deep State.”
“With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State,” he said. “We will expel the war mongers from our government… The great silent majority is rising like never before.”
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