Real estate mogul and The Apprentice star Donald Trump is headed to Iowa on Saturday night to address a conservative group. He told Breitbart News in a phone interview from his plane as it was leaving La Guardia airport in New York City that he is excited to address the large crowd waiting for him in Iowa.
Trump said the event, the Family Leadership Summit, has a “record-setting” crowd size and a “record-setting” amount of press for a non-election year. “We’re setting records both in the number of press and the number of people, that’s great,” Trump said. “I look forward to it.”
Trump is giving the keynote speech on Saturday night.
Reports continue to surface indicating Trump may be running for president in 2016; he recently told the National Review‘s Bob Costa that he has already put up $1 million of his own money to explore the possibility of a campaign. When asked about those reports, Trump told Breitbart News he is more focused on helping conservative candidates in the 2014 midterm elections at this time.
“It’s really too early to think about that,” Trump said of a potential presidential run. “I’m thinking about 2014 first of all and I’m helping a lot of people. I’m thinking about 2014 first.”
“Nobody can really think too much about that until ’14 is over. That’s a very important year, ’14,” he explained. “So we’ll see what happens, but I’m honored that we have such a big crowd tonight. I mean, the crowd is record-setting according to Bob Vander Plaats. And the press is record-setting – and it’s a non-presidential year, it’s a non-election year. So I’m very honored by this tremendous turnout.”
Trump said that he thinks voters around the country like how he tells it like it is. “I think they like what I say, I don’t know that they like me, but they like what I say, which is much more important,” Trump claimed. “And they understand that I have answers. The answer is really not as complex as people think. I think they’re looking forward to hearing about that.”
“They’re tired of being pushed around by OPEC. They’re tired of being pushed around by China and the other countries,” he said. “And you know, we’re like a laughing stock as a country. We’ve become just a punching bag for everybody else.”
Trump said his speech on Saturday night will focus on a range of issues. “We’ll be talking about a lot of things,” he said. “We’ll talk about immigration, we’ll talk about Obamacare, we’ll talk about different things.”
“But we’ll talk about making America great again,” Trump stressed. “My whole message always is making America great again.”
Trump said the way to make America “great again” rests in the entrepreneurial capitalist spirit of competition. “We have to compete much better with the rest of the world because we’re not doing a good job of that,” he said. “They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money, they’re taking everything.”
“We’re left holding the bag with nothing left. We have $17 trillion in debt,” he explained. “It’s very sad what’s happened to our country.”
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