First posted on Instagram
President Donald Trump singled out Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek during a campaign rally in Sioux City on Thursday night, accusing him of voting to let schools socially transition children without telling their parents and of supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries and hormones for minors.
The attack came during a 90-plus-minute speech before about 2,000 people at Sioux Gateway Airport, where Trump was campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, who is locked in a tight race with Turek, and for Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn. As Trump turned his fire on Turek, a local activist in the crowd, Garie Lewis, was escorted out after shouting "that's a lie" — and later posted on Facebook: "How wonderful it is tonight that I got to call Donald Trump a liar in person."
The first accusation refers to Turek's 2023 vote against SF 496, an Iowa law that requires schools to notify parents when a student asks to use a different name or pronouns. The bill passed the Iowa House 57-38 on April 20, 2023, with Turek voting no. The second accusation — that Turek backs spending public money on transgender surgeries and hormones for minors — is a line of attack Hinson's campaign has pressed in its advertising this fall.
That line has been challenged. PolitiFact rated an earlier Hinson campaign ad making the "sex changes for kids" charge False in June, finding that SF 496 deals with names, pronouns and parental notice and does not address medical treatment or surgery. Turek's campaign spokeswoman Hannah Goss told PolitiFact that Turek "does not support gender-affirming surgeries for minors," pointing to the American Medical Association's position that such surgeries should generally be reserved until adulthood.
The Sioux City stop — Trump's seventh speech there since 2015 and his first in northwest Iowa since his re-election — is the first of two Iowa visits he is expected to make before the November 3 midterm elections. Turek, a state representative from Council Bluffs, a four-time Paralympian and two-time wheelchair basketball gold medalist who calls himself a "common-sense prairie populist," faces Hinson for the open Senate seat of retiring Sen. Joni Ernst, with polls showing the race nearly even.