iStock(TOLEDO, Ohio) — President Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail, a day after he addressed the nation and seemed to deescalate the crisis with Iran after the country targeted U.S. troops in Iraq.
In Toledo, Ohio, thousands of his supporters lined the block on Thursday to get into the Huntington Center arena for Trump’s first campaign rally of the election year in a state he won, but in a district he lost in 2016.
Heading to Ohio, the president left behind in Washington an impeachment fight that’s — remarkably — taken a back seat in recent days due to the administration’s recent foreign policy actions in Iran and Iraq.
Vice President Mike Pence earned big cheers from the crowd when he touted that Trump had “launched the first airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in 10 years.”
As Trump was traveling to Toledo, the House approved a War Powers resolution that Democrats said would limit Trump’s ability to take military action against Iran but Republicans claimed was “meaningless” and would undermine his authority as commander in chief.
At the rally Thursday night, Trump further defended his order to take out top Iranian military chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
“Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad, but we stopped him, and we stopped him quickly, and we stopped him cold,” Trump said.
Democrats have argued that no evidence has been presented to prove there was an “imminent” threat, as the administration has said to justify the airstrike.
On Wednesday, one of the president’s own allies, Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee erupted after leaving a classified briefing that members of Congress received by top officials on the decision to order an airstrike.
“The briefing lasted only 75 minutes … (it was) probably the worst briefing I’ve seen — at least on a military issue — in the nine years I’ve served in the U.S. Senate,” Lee said. “Drive-by notification or after-the-fact lame briefings like the one we just received aren’t adequate.”
Trump reiterated on Thursday that he gave the order was “for other reasons that were very obvious. Somebody died — one of our military people died.”
The president’s Toledo rally is the start of a January filled with campaign events and rallies. Two other rallies have already been announced for Wisconsin and New Jersey.
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