President-Elect Donald Trump will hold a rally in Des Moines, Iowa on Thursday evening as part of his “Thank You USA 2016” tour.
Trump will be speaking from Hy-Vee Hall in the Iowa Events Center beginning at 7:00 p.m. Central Time. The event can be viewed in the embedded YouTube player via Right Side Broadcasting.
At this event, Trump is expected to officially announce that Terry Branstad, governor of Iowa, will be his nominee for ambassador to China. Branstad, who was loyal to Trump throughout the campaign, has a close relationship with China’s president, Xi Jinping. If Branstad is nominated and confirmed by the Senate, Kim Reynolds, the current lieutenant governor of Iowa, will take over Branstad’s role and become the state’s first female governor.
This Des Moines rally will be the third stop on the president-elect’s tour of swing states that helped him win on Election Day. Iowa certainly falls into that category; Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012, but Trump took it this year with 51 percent of the vote.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump made many stops in Des Moines and elsewhere in Iowa, and it paid off. Of all the states that were previously won by Obama, Trump took Iowa with the largest margin, nine percentage points over Hillary Clinton.
The president-elect has already held events in Cincinnati, Ohio and Fayetteville, North Carolina. For the most part, these rallies have been roughly the same as they were during the campaign, with Trump hitting similar points and still riling up his supporters in the same way. He was, however, a bit more subdued at his Fayetteville rally. For example, when the crowd began to boo the media, Trump said “no, no,” not encouraging them to continue. During his prior events, Trump often spent several minutes referring to members of the press as disgusting and encouraging supporters to heckle them.
After this rally, Trump on Friday will pay a visit to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and then to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Next week, he will also hold a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania.