With 13 of the 14 GOP candidates seeking the party’s 2024 presidential nomination stumping in sequence at the Iowa Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Dinner, many believed some fireworks would be on the menu.
There was the expectation that, perhaps, this would be the time and place where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, stagnating in the polls, would aggressively target frontrunner Donald Trump—who has not shied away from lambasting him—in an effort to boost his flagging campaign.
Some believed candidates buried further back in the pack would go after Mr. DeSantis, hoping to emerge as the most viable contender to challenge the former President when the inter-party elections begin with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, 2024.
But in the end, it was a rather staid affair at the Iowa Events Center in downtown Des Moines.
The baker’s dozen stayed in their lanes, delivering their 10-minute cattle call pitches to 1,200 caucus precinct captains, county party officials, state lawmakers, and donors with little mention of other candidates.
That is, except for long-shot former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, whose lane—along with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who did not attend—appears primarily to be going after Mr. Trump.
Mr. DeSantis never mentioned Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump—staying in his lane—referred to the Florida governor as “DeSanctus” at least three times during his speech, leaving a minute on the clock when he concluded.
Mr. Trump was the last to speak. Afterward, attendees could visit with candidates in campaign hospitality rooms, which is the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner’s real draw.
The takeaways from candidates’ speeches nearly all addressed common themes—national debt, the economy, the border, national defense, and federal reform.
National Debt/Federal Spending
Former South Carolina Gov. and Trump administration United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said the nation is $32 trillion in debt and needs to borrow money to make interest payments on that debt.“I would love to say Biden did that to us. But I’ve always spoken hard truth and I’m going do that with you today: Republicans did that,” she said, noting Congressional Republicans are as guilty as Democrats in passing $5 trillion in Covid assistance and other stimulus bills since 2020.
Republicans agreed to “double down and open up earmarks again for the first time in 10 years, pushing through 7,000 of them,” Ms. Haley said, adding she would demand Congress do away with earmarks.
“Let’s claw back the $500 billion of unspent COVID dollars that are out there. Instead of 87,000 IRS agents, let’s go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of COVID fraud that exists,” she said. “If [a] percent of our budget is interest, quit borrowing. Cut up these credit cards. Republicans and Democrats have a spending addiction in [Washington].”
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, noting he served in Congress the last time “we balanced a budget in this nation,” said as president he’d balance the budget by growing the private sector of our economy “faster than the government sector of our economy.”
Mr. DeSantis said he’d “repeal ‘Bidenomics’ so that middle-class people actually have a chance to get ahead in this country again, and stop the Congress from borrowing and spending this country into oblivion. We need a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Texas businessman and pastor Ryan Binkley said in eight years, the nation would be $50 trillion in debt, with 14 percent of the federal budget dedicated to paying interest.
“I want to solve this with a Republican-led health care plan,” he said, adding that he has a seven-year plan to balance the budget, “but I can’t do it without a Republican-led health care reform that ends the monopolies in insurance exchanges, health care providers, and ‘Big Pharma.’”
Businessman Perry Johnson said many Americans don’t realize “we are not going broke—we are broke.”
He has a plan: “When I am elected president, no. 1, we will implement my 2-cent plan,” which is to cut “2 cents of every dollar of discretionary” spending.
Conservative radio show host Larry Elder said he’d lobby for a Constitutional amendment to fix spending to a certain percentage of the GDP or, “otherwise both parties are going to continue to spend.”
Federal Reform
Mr. DeSantis reiterated his plan to “get the bureaucracy off the back of small businesses in this country and issue an order to all agencies in [Washington] to reduce their [Washington] footprint by at least 50 percent.”He also vowed to “end the weaponization of federal agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice. On Day One with me as president, you will have a new director of the FBI, long overdue. You will see a housecleaning at the Department of Justice and we are personally going to hold them accountable. We are not going to allow them to target people like parents go into a school board meeting, pro-life demonstrators just speaking their mind, or targeting religious groups like observant Catholics. We are going to ‘re-constitutionalize’ this federal government once and for all.”
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said, “The people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not this managerial bureaucratic, ‘Deep State’ that runs the show today.”
He said those who say they want to “reform” the federal government are making “a false promise.”
“There are good people in this race who will tell you this is the time for reform. We need to work within the institutions we have. We should incrementally reform them for the better. But that’s a false promise,” Ramaswamy said. “When you have an agency that should not exist, an agency that has become so corrupt, that it has abandoned the rule of law from the U.S. Department of Education, to the FBI, to the IRS, to the ATF, to the CDC. We will not just reform them, we will shut them down. That is how we restore the integrity of a constitutional republic.”
Mr. Johnson, Mr. Elder, and several others said they’d also scrutinize the FBI and DOJ and eliminate the DOE.
“I am going to shut down the Department of Education,” Mr. Johnson said. “Right now, only 8 cents of every dollar goes to K-12. I say we just send that money—$68 billion—over to kids and let them spend it any way they want. I’d shut down the FBI … a little tired of this two-system that we have.”
The Border
Mr. Trump said if returned to office, he’d immediately rescind “Biden’s open-border policies” and restore the policies he installed while president.“I created the strongest border in U.S. history, built nearly 500 miles of border wall then wanted to add another 200 miles … ready to go up and when Biden got in, they didn’t do it,” he said. “That’s when we first realized this guy actually wanted open borders where people pour into our country. And many of those people come out of prisons and mental institutions and terrorists, and it’s a terrible thing that they’ve allowed to happen to our country. We'll turn that around very fast.”
“When it comes to the border,” Ms. Haley said. “We‘ll do what we did in South Carolina but we’ll take it national—we‘ll do a national E-Verify program. We’ll put 25,000 Border Patrol and ICE agents on the ground and let them do their job will defund sanctuary cities and instead of catch-and-release, we’ll go to catch-and-deport.”
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said that “because of fentanyl coming across an open border,” it is a national security issue and should be dealt with that way.
“We’ve got to solve that. It took Joe Biden two years to get to the border. I'll be there in the first two weeks,” he said.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, noting he has served as U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency director and was tabbed by then-president George Bush after 9/11 “to lead border security efforts,” said he understands the border and what needs to be done to secure it.
Mr. DeSantis said the border has been an issue his entire adult life and that he will “be the president to finally solve the issue of the southern border. We’re sending the military to the border. Yes. We will build a border wall and we will use deadly force against the Mexican drug cartels because I’m sick of them poisoning our kids. I’m sick of them killing our citizens and I’m sick of them trafficking people into this country. That ends on Jan. 20, 2025.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said if elected, “I will use the power of the presidency to stop the cartels in their tracks. Without question, they must cease to exist on our side of the border. We must also close our southern border so that 6 million illegal immigrants under radical Joe Biden do not continue to cross our southern border—and that’s before they ended Title 42, which could make it 10 million illegal immigrants crossing our borders. We deserve better.”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said the “porous border” is a concern far beyond the border. He cited the ‘Sound Of Freedom’ movie’s “startling statistic that human trafficking will outpace for the cartels the sale of guns and drugs. Can you believe that? It’s shocking to the conscience. But it is something that is happening every single day.”
“I will use the U.S. military to secure our own southern border and our northern border. That is how we stand for the rule of law in the United States of America,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.
Economic Development
Former Vice President Mike Pence said, “We can end the inflation inflicted by the Biden administration on American families by ending runaway spending, confronting our debt crisis, and [make] the Trump-Pence tax cuts permanent.”Mr. Burgum said, “America needs 180-degree change from the direction where Joe Biden is taking us right now. Joe Biden is wrong on the economy. He’s wrong on energy, and he’s wrong on national security, which includes food security and border security. He’s just plain wrong. And to turn this country around, we need someone who understands how to compete and win in a changing economy. Someone who knows how to shrink government.”
His plan would be to “focus on innovation, not regulation. That’s going to help people reach their fullest potential. That’s how we beat China in a cold war, we get our economy really rolling.”
Mr. Scott said the economy will take care of itself if the government stays out of the way.
“We have the power to get these things accomplished at home—minerals, medicines and microchips, three specific areas that, as President of the United States, I would focus the intellectual ability and the workforce to make sure that we create 10 million new American jobs and start creating the essentials at home, creating great jobs for Americans,” he said.
Mr. Hurd said the nation is either on the verge of an economic boon or a disaster. The next president must understand how technology is rapidly changing the playing field.
“We have new technologies, like artificial intelligence, that are coming in and going up in every single industry, not in 10 years, but or two or three years, and we have to make sure that our kids are ready for jobs that don’t exist today,” he said. “This is going to impact every single American and these are some of the issues that we have to be dealing with.”
Mr. Trump didn’t go into detail. “Under my leadership, we created the greatest economy in the history of the world. The greatest,” he said. “And, in fact, I actually did it twice, as you very well know.”
National Defense
Several candidates suggested the debacle that was the United States’ August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan inspired Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and is embedding the People’s Republic of China to be aggressive in the western Pacific.Mr. Trump said under his plan, “We were getting out of Afghanistan very powerfully with dignity and strength. In fact, I spoke to the leader of the Taliban, and from that time on, not one American soldier was killed, 18 months, not one soldier was killed, until Biden came along and ended up giving them $85 billion worth of equipment left many Americans behind. We lost 13 Incredible lives, and many, many badly wounded, the most embarrassing, I think, moment in the history of our country.
“And because of that,” he continued, “I believe that was the incentive for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine when he saw the incompetence of our military and our leadership more than anything else. The whole Afghanistan mess, what a shame it was.”
Somehow, the former president claimed he “fully rebuilt the U.S. military” during his single term in the White House and, somehow, in less than three years since he’s departed, the military has completely deteriorated.
Mr. Trump said he “created Space Force, defeated ISIS, and was the first president in decades who didn’t start a war.”
Mr. Hutchinson said, “These are serious times in terms of global threats. And yes, I believe in [an] America that needs to be strong. I believe [in] an America that needs to assert its leadership and that we should not yield to China’s leadership on the world stage. Yes, these are serious times in which we live in our freedoms are at stake. And because these are serious times, we need serious-minded leaders.”
Mr. Suarez said he is “worried about the rising threat of China, not just as an economic threat but certainly as a national security threat. They’ve taken Cuba, which was an ideological enemy, and it converted it into a national security crisis, where you have now not just a spy base, but you now have a base where they are supposedly, potentially going to be training the military.”
If elected, he said, “I can guarantee that will not happen. We continue to get weaker, we continue to project weakness on a global level. And we failed to project strength. And we failed to project competency.”
Mr. DeSantis, noting he is “the only candidate running for president on either side of the aisle this year that’s actually served in a war,” said the Biden administration has fostered a recruiting crisis by implementing “woke” policies that are turning people away.
“As commander-in-chief, on Day One, we are going to rip the politics out of the military. We’re going to end the ‘woke’ agenda and we are going to restore the military to mission-first,” he said. “We’re going to make people proud to serve again and join again, and that’s going to make our country stronger.”
Mr. Scott said that as “commander-in-chief, I will stand toe -to-toe against China and say ‘Not on my watch.’ When you continue to spy on our kids, buy our farm lands, and steal our jobs in our supply chain, we will stop them and win this economic war by creating jobs in America, high tech, high manufacturing jobs for marvel of the world.”
Mr. Pence said as president he will “embrace our role as leader of the free world, confront Russian aggression, and Chinese provocations with a new military fitted to the challenges in the 21st century. And we can end the political correctness at the Pentagon, including reinstituting a ban on transgender personnel in the United States military.”
Mr. Hurd, noting he served as an undercover CIA officer for 10 years whose “job was to stop terrorists from blowing up our homeland” said the United States is faced with “a number of generational defining challenges” in homeland defense.
“I’ve seen are enemies up close and personal. The Chinese government is trying to surpass us as a global superpower. This is not my opinion, this is what the Chinese government is saying about themselves in English,” he said. “Why should we care if they win? That means our dollar won’t go as far, our retirement accounts won’t last as long. We’re going to have to learn Mandarin Chinese because that will be the ‘Language of Business.’ Our kids and our grandkids are not going to be able to get the best-paying jobs in the world. That’s why we have to care about this new Cold War that we’re in with the Chinese government. We are living in increasingly complicated times and we need common sense in Washington.”
Ms. Haley said the Biden administration is not up to task.
“When you look at our national security, look at the fact that we’ve got a Chinese spy balloon going over our country, you’ve got Russia invading Ukraine, you’ve got China on the march, you’ve got North Korea testing ballistic missiles, Iran building a bomb,” she said. “But none of that would have happened had we not had that debacle in Afghanistan. Think about what that told our friends. More importantly, think about what that told our enemies. And when you look at China and the threat that they are, they’re literally infiltrating our country. They have been planning war with us for years. We’ve got to snap out of it. And Biden’s not the one to do it.”
Energy Policy
Mr. Burgum said under his administration, “We will stop buying energy from our enemies will start selling it to our allies.”He said instead of green-only energy, it should be all of the above energy.
“America produces energy cleaner and safer than anywhere else in the world. If you say you care about the environment, you would want to have every drop of energy produced in the United States,” Burgum said.
“This administration has given us a weak energy policy in which they put all green above all of the above in energy sources,” Mr. Hutchison said. “We need to reverse that. We need to have a pro-growth energy policy that is emphasizing growth and meeting the needs of our economy and not meeting the needs of similar environmental concerns.”
“We reject policies like the ‘Green New Deal.’ We will develop our own natural resources and we will be energy independent because we don’t want to help our enemies,” Mr. DeSantis said.
About The Former President
Mr. Hurd was the only one among the 12 to directly address Mr. Trump and his mounting legal issues, although several made passing or veiled references to the former president.It has been 20 years since a Republican has won the national popular vote for president and that under Mr. Trump the GOP lost the House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2022, he said.
“And the reason Donald Trump lost the election in 2020 Is he failed to grow the GOP brand in areas
like women with a college degree in the suburbs, black and brown communities, and people under the age of 35,” Mr. Hurd said.
And that’s not going to change in 2024, he predicted and claimed the former president is not seeking office to benefit his nation, but only to benefit himself.
“Donald Trump is not running for president to ‘make America great again.’ Donald Trump is not running for president to represent the people that voted for him in 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison,” Mr. Hurd said.
“And if we elect,” he continued amid a rising chorus of boos, “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. Listen, I know the truth. The truth is hard. But, if we elect Donald Trump, we are willingly giving Joe Biden four more years in the White House and America can’t handle that. God bless you and God bless America.”
Hutchinson referenced “multiple criminal cases are pending against former President Trump” and that “Iowa has an opportunity to say we, as a party, we need a new direction for America and for the GOP. We are a party of individual responsibility, accountability and support for the rule of law. We must not abandon that. it is a time for serious leaders to meet the serious challenges that we have.”
Mr. Pence said there is a “temptation to cling to what is familiar over leadership fitted to the times, but I believe we must resist the politics of personality and the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative values. Different times calls for different leadership to defeat Joe Biden. I believe we must give the American people new Republican leadership with a proven commitment to the conservative agenda.”
Mr. Elder said it was an honor to be accused of being like Mr. Trump.
“When I ran for governor of California, Joe Biden flew in and said ‘Larry Elder is the closest thing to a Donald Trump clone as I’ve ever seen.’ Now, was I supposed to be insulted or flattered? To that charge, I plead guilty,” he said, pausing for sustained applause. “Thank you. You’re cutting into my time.”
Mr. Ramaswamy said the point wasn’t to diminish each other, but to defeat the Democrats.
“There are many good people running, good-hearted people. I will not personally attack any of them. These are good people who wish to serve this country,” he said. “We are running to something, we’re not just running from something.”
Additional Topics
— Ukraine: The Russia-Ukraine war was barely mentioned.“I know I’m probably going to get killed by Christie and Pence, but I only know that we’re sending $113 billion to Ukraine when we’re going broke here,” Mr. Johnson said.
“Biden has led us now into another seemingly endless and senseless war that must be stopped with diplomacy and strength considering the freedom of all nations involved,” Mr. Binkley said.
The former South Carolina governor said she supports “mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75” who is serving in Congress or in any federal agencies.
“That’s not being disrespectful. These are people who are making decisions on our national security. They’re making decisions on our economic policy. These are tough tests,” Ms. Haley said. “What town were you born in? How many grandchildren do you have?”
As laughter rose, she shrugged, “What? I don’t know what you’re laughing it.”
“Biden has proven to be incredibly weak and Kamala is not up for the job,” Ms. Haley said. “And I will continue to say a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris. That’s who we’re actually running against. We have to make sure she doesn’t win.”
“I got Kamala Harris coming down to Florida trying to create a phony narratives because she understands Florida has stood up to the left’s agenda,” Mr. DeSantis said. “She thinks she can come and lie about we’re doing in the state of Florida. I’m not budging an inch. We are going to fight back against these people and we are not letting them take over our schools any longer.”
“To protect the America we all love, we must first start by backing the blue,” he said. “Every law enforcement officer in this country deserves our respect and our admiration. You see the radical left they wanted to fund and demonize and demoralize the police. It’s our responsibility to refund and rebuild local law enforcement. We must restore dignity and respect. But we also have to get tougher on violent criminals from carjackers, the cop killers who should never see the light of day again. And by doing so, we will allow grandmothers like the one that raised me not to be trapped in her house from the time the sun goes down until the time the sun comes up.
“In Arkansas, I signed over 30 Pro-Life bills,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “Arkansas was known as the number one Pro-Life state in the nation. I did that as governor and let me tell you, if I’m president of the United States, I will be a Pro-Life president.
“We can end Biden’s radical abortion agenda,” Pence said, reiterating his call for a federal 15-week ban.
“We have to connect to college students. We lost 70 percent of college students” in 2020, he said. “There’s going to be 70 million Gen Zers and millennials entering this next election. And right now we don’t have a message or messenger that’s resonating to their hearts.”
Several others scored some laughs, too, although Mr. Burgum’s were mixed in with some raspberries when he mentioned North Dakotans have had success in Iowa as underdogs.
“Iowa has been good to underdogs from North Dakota. As a matter of fact, Catherine [his wife] and I, two of the best days of our lives have been spent in Iowa. The first one, the North Dakota State Bisons beat the [Iowa State] Cyclones [in football] and the second one was when the North Dakota State Bisons defeated the [University of Iowa] Hawkeyes.”
The boos came. “What? Too soon? Come on. That was 2014 and 2016. Come on. Let’s move on,” Mr. Burgum laughed.
Mr. DeSantis made a few promises that elicited chuckles.
“I can promise you this: in my White House, there will be no cocaine allowed. And look, my son’s only five-years-old, so he’s not going to be lining his pockets with money from foreign governments. So don’t worry about that,” he said.
Mr. Suarez, noting Mr. Hutchinson’s mic got plugged the second he exceeded the 10-minute mark, noted, “These guys aren’t playing around. There’s no ‘Cuban time’ extension or anything like that.”
