Iowa Crowd Roars 'Lock Her up' After Trump Mentions Feinstein
An old chant with a new target emerged Tuesday night at President Donald Trump’s rally as Iowa residents let California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein know what they think of her.
Trump appeared at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the free-wheeling type of rally that was a hallmark of his 2016 presidential campaign. During the event, he slammed Democrats for smearing the reputation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and mocked Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Feinstein received a letter from Christine Blasey Ford alleging Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party in the early 1980s. The senator kept the existence of the letter a secret for more than a month.
The letter was later made public, which was against Ford’s wishes. Feinstein is among the Democratic senators accused of leaking the letter in a last-ditch effort to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
With that as the background, the president decided to give Tuesday night’s Iowa crowd a bit of theater, portraying an imagined dialogue between Feinstein and an investigator.
“Did you leak the documents?” Trump asked.
“Wha, wha, what? No, I didn’t!” he replied. He imitated Feinstein looking over her shoulder to her aides. “Did we leak? Did we leak?”
As the crowd roared its approval, Trump, playing Feinstein, then said, “No! No! No, we didn’t!”
And then it happened. The rallying cry of the 2016 campaign — then directed at Democrat Hillary Clinton over her email scandal — began to emerge.
“Lock her up!” the crowd roared.
“I think they’re talking about Feinstein! Can you believe that?” Trump said.
“Was that the worst body language? Honestly!” he said.
“In other words, did she leak it? 100 percent! No, I don’t want to get sued. 99 percent. See? Now I can’t get sued,” the president said.
The crowd did find time later in the rally to chant “lock her up” when Clinton was mentioned.
Feinstein did not give Trump’s performance very high reviews, calling it “ridiculous and an embarrassment,” The Associated Press reported.
“Dr. Blasey Ford knows I kept her confidence, she and her lawyers said so repeatedly,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Republican senators admit it. Even the reporter who broke the story said it wasn’t me or my staff.”
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