After months of jabbing from afar, President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are overlapping today (Tuesday) in Iowa, a state that’s critical to their political futures. The former vice president is in Iowa hoping to hold his party’s front-runner role. Trump seeks to shore up support in a key Midwestern state he wrested from Democrats in 2016. The day could offer a glimpse of a Trump-Biden matchup in this battleground state.
Trump begins his trip in Council Bluffs to speak at Southwest Iowa Renewable Energy, which produces and sells the corn-based fuel additive ethanol. He will later address an Iowa GOP dinner in Des Moines. Biden is coming two days after nearly 20 Democratic rivals were in Iowa for a state party dinner. Several took veiled shots at his absence. He plans to use his visit to Iowa to criticize President Donald Trump’s economic policy as hurting those very voters who helped elect him.
Biden says in remarks prepared for delivery today (Tuesday) that Trump “thinks he’s being tough” and “it’s easy to be tough when someone else is feeling the pain.” Biden plans to speak in blue collar Ottumwa, the seat of Wapello County. Trump was the first Republican to carry the economically struggling county in southeast Iowa since Dwight Eisenhower.
Biden asks in his prepared remarks, “How many sleepless nights do you think Trump has had over what he’s doing to America’s farmers? Zero.” Trump has attacked Biden regularly and on a recent state visit to Japan echoed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s description of Biden as “low IQ.”