Trump Opens Reelection Year at Rally in Ohio

For his first campaign rally of 2020, Trump returned to Ohio, where he has devoted much of his travel over the past three years hoping to cement support that will be crucial to rebuilding the Electoral College coalition he assembled in 2016. But job growth has stalled in the state, and Democrats are accusing him of failing to live up to his promise of restoring manufacturing in the region.

Trump celebrated his decision to order a drone strike killing Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite security forces, calling him “the world’s top terrorist” and insisting that he was planning to attack American embassies. “He was a bad guy,” Trump told a cheering crowd at the Huntington Center, a minor-league hockey arena. “He was a bloodthirsty terror and he’s no longer a terror. He’s dead.”

Hours after House Democrats passed a resolution intended to limit Trump’s ability to go to war with Iran, the president said Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her priorities wrong. “I see the radical left Democrats have expressed outrage over the termination of this terrorist,” he said. “Instead, they should be outraged by Soleimani’s savage crimes.”

He singled out Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, mocking the congressman as a faux bureaucrat who would rather talk about taking out a terrorist than actually doing so. “You little pencil neck,” Trump then said derisively, as if addressing Schiff.

Several demonstrators disrupted the president’s speech, holding up hand-drawn signs saying, “NO WAR,” before being removed by security agents.

Trump’s trip to Ohio was the 15th of his presidency. Awaiting him was an arena full of enthusiastic supporters, many decked out in classic red “Make America Great Again” caps and waving “Keep America Great” placards. Outside the arena were smaller but energized crowds of protesters, many of them waving union signs or handmade banners, like “Dump Trump.”

Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, and the state has been the bedrock of every winning Republican presidential candidate going back to the 19th century. Polling in Ohio last fall showed Trump trailing some of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in hypothetical matchups, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont by 6 percentage points and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts by 4 points, but there has been little recent independent public surveying in the state.

In few places will the economic argument be as important for Trump’s chances of winning a second term as in the Midwest, where he vowed to rebuild a manufacturing industry that has struggled in recent decades.

In Ohio, unemployment has fallen to 4.2% but remains higher than the national rate. The state lost 4,400 jobs last year through November and shed 2,200 manufacturing jobs over the previous year.

Ohio Democrats welcomed the president to the state by attacking his “failed policies,” like the “trade war by tweet,” as David Pepper, the state party chairman, put it. “Donald Trump has broken his promises on jobs, on trade, on health care, on education and on so much more,” Pepper told reporters.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longtime Democratic congresswoman from Toledo, said that Trump did not understand the struggle that many of her constituents face. “It is struggle that cannot be understood from behind a podium in an arena, nor a tower in Manhattan, nor a golf course in West Palm Beach,” she wrote in an open letter to the president.

Trump will ramp up campaign travel as the year progresses and Democrats begin voting to choose their nominee. He has rallies scheduled in the next few weeks in Milwaukee, to build support in another key Midwest battleground, and Wildwood, New Jersey, to campaign with Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who left the Democratic Party over impeachment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .