Updates: Trump touts economy in Iowa amid outrage over Minnesota killings

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• US President Donald Trump took his midterm messaging to Clive, Iowa, where he championed his trade deals and tariff policy under a banner that read, “Lower prices, bigger paychecks”.
•  Trump used his speech to continue his threats towards Iran. “There’s another beautiful armada floating beautifully toward Iran right now,” he said, without specifying if he meant the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group, which arrived in the Middle East on Monday.
• As the White House awaits a Supreme Court decision on its tariff policies, Trump signalled he would forge ahead with a campaign of heavy import taxes regardless of the ruling: “One way or the other, we’re going to do it. If we have to do it a different way, we’ll do it.”
• Ecuador has issued a statement accusing US immigration enforcement agents of trying to breach its consulate in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• A US district judge has put a temporary hold on the deportation of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, after critics accused immigration agents of using the child to lure his family into custody.
• Trump has continued to walk a fine line in addressing Saturday’s killing of Alex Pretti, distancing himself from administration officials who called the late nurse a “domestic terrorist”, but still faulting Pretti for legally carrying a personal firearm.
• Democrats increased their calls for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem to resign amid outcry over Pretti’s death.
• Trump defended Noem as doing a “good job” and denied she would step down. The two held a closed-door meeting on Monday evening at the White House to address the Pretti shooting.

While Trump has sought to distance himself from comments against the late nurse Alex Pretti, he has nevertheless continued to shift blame for the shooting away from immigration agents and towards Democrats – and Pretti himself.

“I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That’s a lot of bad stuff,” Trump told reporters in Iowa.

Pretti, a legal observer and ICU nurse, was shot dead by immigration agents on Saturday during a protest.

He was licensed to carry a firearm, and at no point during the altercation did he appear to draw his weapon, according to video footage. Rather, the footage appears to show federal agents removing the gun from Pretti’s waistband before he was shot dead.

In the past, Trump has expressed support for armed protesters aligned with causes he is sympathetic to. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, he praised a group of armed protesters who entered the Michigan state capitol demanding an end to public health measures. He called them “very good people” and said that lawmakers should meet with them.

The US president also pardoned nearly all of those convicted of crimes related to January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump’s supporters, many of them armed, violently stormed the US Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of his election loss.

Congressman Zach Nunn, who represents Iowa’s third district, has warned that Democrats will seek to impeach Trump should they flip party control of the House in the midterms.

“On day one, Hakeem Jeffries – or maybe Nancy Pelosi again, we don’t know – is going to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment,” Nunn said in warm-up remarks to Trump’s speech this afternoon.

“And on day two, he’s going to take all the great things we’ve done here and raise our taxes. And on day three, four, five, 365 days, this country will be locked, not in something that works to go forward,  but in a constant battle.”

That fear has been a recurring theme for Republicans in recent weeks. Trump himself has warned Republican voters that a poor showing in the midterms would result in his impeachment.

“You’ve got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be – I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said on January 6.

The Republican leader was already impeached twice during his first term, once for abuse of office, after he was accused of pressuring Ukraine to deliver damaging information about his election rival, Joe Biden.

The second impeachment was for inciting a riot on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the US Capitol, spurred by his false claims of election fraud.

Trump has renewed his attacks on Representative Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a child refugee from Somalia.

Since November, Trump has repeatedly attacked Somalia and its diaspora, singling out Omar in particular.

Omar is a member of the progressive “squad” in the House of Representatives and is also one of Trump’s most vocal critics.

Faced with a cheering crowd in Clive, Trump pivoted from comments about tightening immigration requirements to slamming Omar.

“They have to show that they can love our country. They have to be proud. Not like Ilhan Omar,” he said.

“She’s always talking about, ‘The Constitution provides me with the following’. The Constitution? She comes from a country that’s a disaster.”

He then broadened his remarks to all of Somalia and threatened military attacks against pirates based out of the country.

“It’s not even a country, OK? It barely has a governor. I don’t think it does. They’re good at one thing: pirates. But they don’t do that any more. You know why? Because they get the same treatment from us as the drug dealers get: Boom, boom, boom.

“I don’t care what ship they’re attacking. When they attack, when we see them going in, ping! That’s the end of it.”

The US conducted nearly 126 attacks in Somalia during 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term.

The US president says that a large “armada” is heading towards Iran, repeating his threats against the country and saying that the government in Tehran should yield to US demands.

“By the way, there’s another beautiful armada floating beautifully toward Iran right now. So we’ll see. I hope they make a deal. I hope they make a deal. They should have made a deal the first time. They’d have a country,” he said.

Trump also said he “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity with strikes on three facilities in June. It remains unclear just how much those strikes, which were unprovoked and likely illegal under international law, set back Iran’s enrichment capacity.

“People have been waiting for 22 years to do that,” he said of the June bombing.

During his first term, Trump scuttled a 2015 deal limiting Iran’s nuclear capacity, opting instead for a campaign of “maximum pressure” meant to severely weaken the country’s economy through withering sanctions.

One of the looming questions for the Trump administration is how the Supreme Court might rule on the legality of its tariff policies.

Lower courts have ruled that his sweeping tariff regimen is illegal, but Trump has used his campaign-style stops – including today’s in Clive – to denounce such decisions as pro-China.

“ I hope we win the Supreme Court case,” Trump said in Clive. “You know, we have people that are China-oriented, people literally that [are] very China-oriented and foreign-country-oriented trying to stop that.”

He warned, however, that even a decision from the Supreme Court would not prevent him from pursuing wide-ranging tariffs.

“We’ll get it done. One way or the other, we’re going to do it. If we have to do it a different way, we’ll do it,” Trump said.

“But we’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re doing amazing. Nobody can even believe it. Foreign countries cannot believe what’s happened. They’re studying us, but it won’t work.”

The US president, who has alarmed analysts with his efforts to pressure the Federal Reserve, says that he will select a new chair for the US central bank “soon”.

Trump has pushed current chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, and his administration has opened a probe into Powell that has been widely condemned as politically motivated.

“He wants to keep rates as high as possible,” Trump told the crowd.

“When we have a great Fed chairman, and I think we’re going to have one, I’ll announce it pretty soon, you’ll see rates come down a lot.”

Iowa has an economy based largely on agriculture, but that economy has taken a hit, particularly amid international trade tensions.

Still, speaking to a crowd at Clive, Iowa, Trump touted his tariff policy as helping to engineer trade deals that benefit US farmers.

“ The European Union will dramatically increase purchases of American pork, dairy and soya bean oil. They never did that before,” Trump said.

“They’re all doing things that they never did before, because you have a certain president that’s a little bit different from the presidents that you had before.  And nations from Cambodia to Thailand to the Philippines and Indonesia are eliminating all trade barriers to agricultural products.”

Trump has long loved to do impressions from the stage, and in Tuesday’s remarks to Clive, Iowa, he returned to one of his perennial favourites: French President Emmanuel Macron.

The bit always starts with the same premise. Trump allegedly asks Macron to submit to a US demand, and the French president – at least in Trump’s telling – always replies with a fussy string of “no, no, nos”, before ultimately relenting.

In the past, Trump has used the segment to highlight his efforts to lower prescription drug prices. This time, Trump pointed to vehicle prices.

“I called Macron in France. I said, ‘You’ve got to double the price of your trucks.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. I will not do that,'” Trump said on stage in Iowa.

Trump also took a moment to poke fun at the aviator sunglasses Macron wore at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“What was the story with his glasses the other day? What the hell was that all about?” he asked the laughing crowd.

The US president used his Iowa rally to kick off his midterm campaigning, but he has also spent today’s speech lowering expectations for Republicans ahead of November’s vote.

He noted the tendency for parties that win the presidency to lose the midterms.

“Something happens, a screw turns with the voters,” he said. “So even if it’s the Democrat, whoever wins the presidency has a hard time with the midterms.”

Still, Trump encouraged Republicans to turn out in droves for the midterms.

“If we lose the midterms, you’ll lose so many of the things that we’re talking about,” he added. “We’ve got to win the midterms.”

In Iowa, the US president has been making the case for his first year in office, hailing his reciprocal tariffs and the benefits he claims they have yielded for farmers.

This comes despite farm groups pointing to steep costs caused by global trade wars, which have required government supplement packages.

But a year in, Trump remains preoccupied with his erstwhile opponent, former President Joe Biden, repeatedly mocking the Democrat for his advanced age.

“You think Biden was thinking about it?” Trump, 79, said of his tariff policy. “He just was thinking about how the hell to get off the stage.”

Later, he was asked if Biden thought about farmers.

“He just wanted to go to sleep,” he said.

After a second heckler interrupted his rally in Clive, Iowa, Trump repeated his claim that protests against his administration are a result of “paid agitators”.

“You do know they’re paid agitators, right?” Trump told the crowd. “They’re paid insurrectionists, really, in some cases. They’re sickos.”

He has made similar false claims about the protests against his administration’s immigration raids in Minneapolis, and his administration has long cast dissent and opposition as the product of a shadowy financial network seeking to stir up chaos.

Trump’s remarks in Clive, Iowa, were briefly interrupted when a protester screamed at him from the crowd.

The Republican leader had been musing about his efforts “standing up for American workers”.

“I could have had a nice, easy presidency. I probably have this little piece of ear back,” Trump said, gesturing to the ear that was clipped by a bullet during an assassination attempt in 2024.

He then gestured to the heckler, “ I wouldn’t have to listen to lunatics like this up there. I wouldn’t have to listen.”

As security escorted the protester from the event site, Trump took the opportunity to praise law enforcement. “They’re good here. Do we love our law enforcement? They work very quickly.”

After a whirlwind opening to the year, which included the abduction of Venezuela’s Maduro, threats to annex Greenland, and the high-profile killing of US citizens in Minnesota by immigration enforcement agents, Trump appears to be returning to basics in his latest rally.

“So now we’re back where it all started, to celebrate the greatest first year of any administration in American history,” Trump said.

“Today, just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming, incomes are rising, investment is soaring, inflation has been defeated. Our border is closed, totally closed.”

Polls have shown slumping support for Trump on the economy, one of his strongest issues in the 2024 election. While some economic indicators remain strong, economists have noted that the gains have largely not been felt by the middle class.

A survey released earlier today showed US consumer confidence hit a low in January not seen since 2014.

The US president has set the tone for his speech, re-upping his oft-repeated and false claim that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.

“We had a rigged election,” Trump said, referring to the 2020 vote.

The statement remains significant with the 2026 midterm elections looming. Concerns have already emerged that Trump may spread misinformation ahead of the polls.

Trump also floated running for another term, despite it being barred by the US Constitution.

“Should we do it a fourth time?” he asked the crowd.

US District Judge Fred Biery of Texas has issued a ruling that temporarily blocks five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, from being deported.

The decision comes after outcry over the father and child’s detention.

Last week, images went viral of the five-year-old, wearing a bunny hat, being held by immigration enforcement agents in the snow outside his home in Columbia Heights, Minneapolis.

Witnesses reported that the immigration agents had asked Conejo Ramos to knock on his family’s door to force his father to exit the building, leading to public outrage. Critics accused federal authorities of using the child as “bait”, which the Trump administration has denied.

Both father and son are being held in Dilley, Texas.

US District Judge Brian Murphy has given the go-ahead for the offshore wind project Vineyard Wind, located near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to proceed with construction.

The decision lifts a pause that the Trump administration placed on the project and four others on December 22.

In a statement at the time, the US Department of the Interior said all leases for large-scale offshore wind projects would be suspended due to “national security risks identified by the Department of War in recently completed classified reports”.

It blamed wind turbines for creating radar interference that could obscure “legitimate moving targets” from adversaries.

Trump has long opposed wind technology, denouncing it as part of a “green new scam” and blaming the turbines for harming whales and birds. Many of his claims have been denounced as false.