President Trump is set to rally supporters in an open Democratic House district next week, taking his show on the road to Duluth, Minn. The president’s campaign says he’ll tout the “surging economy, including record-low unemployment and fair trade reforms, and his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.”
Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., thinks he knows why Trump is eager to rally in a state that voted (narrowly) for Hillary Clinton. His theory involves a professional wrestler.
“The fact that he’s going to show up in northern Minnesota — when most people would say to a Republican president, ‘Why, why would you go to northern Minnesota?’, Emmer says on a Friday episode of Rep. Sean Duffy’s ‘Plaidcast,’ obtained early by the Washington Examiner. “it’s because he understands he represents everyone in this country. And again, the forgotten men and women of America that think their politicians haven’t been listening to them for years, they expect something more out of this president, and he delivers.”
Situated on the shores of Lake Superior, Duluth is far north of Emmer’s district, but just a short boat trip away from the Wisconsin district Duffy represents. The city falls within St. Louis County, which preferred Clinton to Trump by more than ten points in 2016. But the president put up double-digit margins in the counties immediately to its west.
According to Emmer, Minnesota could go for Trump in 2020. “He can win it next time and I think he knows that,” the congressman asserted.
Trump lost Minnesota to Clinton by less than two points in 2016, something of a feat in a state no Republican presidential candidate has won in more than four decades.
And that’s where former Minnesota governor and retired wrestler Jesse Ventura comes in.
Looking back on the 2016 election, Emmer reflected, “I hadn’t seen what I saw in Minnesota since Jesse Ventura.” Ventura won his unorthodox 1998 bid for governor, according to Emmer, “because people are tired of the same old, same old” and of “politicians who they know are telling them what they want to hear instead of what they really believe.”
“Jesse showed up — he might have been a goofball and all the rest of it, which he was — but Jesse shows up, and he’s talking like a human being, as opposed to the other two political professionals, so he gets elected. We pretty much had the same thing with Donald Trump,” Emmer noted.
“Although you may not like his style,” the congressman said of Trump, “he knows exactly what he’s doing. And when he showed up in Minnesota for [his visit on Nov. 6, 2016] — I travel the whole state, not just the 6th District — there were more 4×8 sheets of plywood, homemade signs, red, white, and blue, flags off the sides of them, all over the state of Minnesota. You knew something big was happening.”
“When Donald Trump came to town three days before the election, it was a religious experience,” Emmer recalled.
In that context, Trump’s trip to Duluth could make for an interesting show — even more than usual. He’s sure to be dogged by questions about his trade policy, which could hit some parts of Minnesota quite hard. But Trump is still likely to tout his “America First” strategy when he’s in the Iron Range. Asked by Duffy how Trump’s talk of steel and aluminum tariffs goes over in the area, Emmer contended it “play[s] well in northern Minnesota.”
“Are there people that are conflicted about the tariffs? Absolutely, and they always will be,” Emmer said. “But they know something needs to be done.”
“More and more every day,” he says, “people in my state are looking at this president and saying, ‘You know what, he really is looking out for me.'”
That statement will be put to the test in a big way this fall.
