With hay bales lining the back of the stage, country music on the speakers and food from Jethro’s BBQ being served, Ashley Hinson welcomed donors to the Iowa Events Center in Clive on Saturday night for her big annual fundraiser, Ashley’s BBQ Bash. The three-term Republican congressmember is currently running for the U.S. Senate to replace Joni Ernst, who is not seeking reelection.
The lineup of speakers included a who’s who of the most prominent Republicans in Iowa, from Gov. Kim Reynolds to the man aspiring to fill her seat, Zach Lahn. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was the fundraiser’s special guest speaker.
Speaker after speaker emphasized the importance of this year’s election, saying the control of the U.S. House and Senate depends on who Iowans elect. As President Trump’s approval ratings have declined this year, the possibility that Democrats will gain control of the House, the Senate or both no longer rests on just one or two states, but both Republicans and Democrats continue to use the “road to control runs through ___” rhetoric, as speakers at the BBQ Bash did.
“So, I’m going to be straight with you here today — we’re all friends in this room, right?” Hinson said to the crowd of donors. “The fight ahead of us is not going to be an easy one. I think you all know that from the TV advertising and mail you’re already getting.”
“The political left is looking a little bit more desperate than I’ve ever seen them at this point, and we know that desperation is only going to get worse between now and November. Their grip on power is slipping. And I think you all know what happens when people feel power slipping through their fingers. They’re not going to let go quietly.”
Hinson did not elaborate on what she meant by the political left’s “grip on power,” which is not obvious given the fact that Republicans control the presidency, the House and the Senate, and the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court is more obliging to the Trump administration than lower federal courts are.
Both Hinson and Cruz spent much of their time warning about what Democrats in abstract may do if they win control of Congress, rather than talking about any actual Democrat has said, although both criticized state Rep. Josh Turek, Hinson’s Democratic opponent in the Senate race. Hinson talked about Turek more than Cruz did, but both attacked Turek for skipping votes, as well as some of the votes he took in his two terms in the Iowa House. Both also mocked Turek for his recent ad, in which Turek says he wants to work with Trump on border security.
The Democrats running for Congress this year are “the same kind of people who nearly destroyed our country just a few short years ago,” Hinson warned. She asked the audience to close their eyes and cast their minds back to 2020 when the country-destroying was ongoing, according to her. One of the destructive actions she cited was vaccine requirements for entering public spaces and attending school at the height of COVID.
She did not mention the fact that Donald Trump was president in 2020 and ultimately in charge of the country’s COVID policies. At the state-level, Gov. Kim Reynolds was in charge, of course. Reynolds was one of the first featured guests at the BBQ Bash, speaking well before Hinson took the stage.
Ted Cruz also offered grim warnings about Democrats in the abstract when he spoke at the end of the fundraiser.
“These people are certifiable,” he said. “I don’t mean kind-of-sort-of crazy. I don’t mean a little bit crazy. I mean cuckoo.”
Cruz walked on stage to the sound of Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” a Bush-era anthem (“And the Statue of Liberty started shakin’ her fist/And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell/When you hear mother freedom start ringin’ her bell”). Cruz then delivered a speech that, for the most part, could have served as a stump speech for himself if he was running for office this year.
Iowans have heard Cruz’s stump speeches before. In 2016, he won the Iowa Caucus, beating Donald Trump, who immediately, and with no evidence, declared that the Republican caucus was “rigged.” Cruz went on the win 10 more Republican primaries before dropping out after Super Tuesday. Cruz endorsed Trump, even though Trump had continually belittled Cruz — nicknaming him “Lyin’ Ted,” among other personal insults — attacked Cruz’s wife as unattractive, and claimed Cruz’s father was likely involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Since that endorsement, Cruz has been among Trump’s most loyal followers.
This was the third major Republican event in Iowa that Cruz has headlined in the last three months. In May, he was a featured speaker at the Iowa Faith and Free Coalition’s forum. Last month, he gave the keynote speech at Attorney General Brenna Bird’s annual fundraiser.
Cruz is widely expected to run for president again in 2028, and at the beginning of his speech he nodded towards the state’s role in the presidential primary season.
“There’s a reason Democrats decided they didn’t want to start in Iowa anymore,” Cruz said. “Because the national Democrat [sic] Party looked at the people of Iowa, and said Iowa values are no longer what they represent or give a flip about. They looked at farmers and ranchers and said Democrats got nothing to offer because instead they represent the green-haired freaks in New York City and Los Angeles.”
Neither New York nor California are in the Democratic Party’s lineup of states holding early primaries in 2028. The first states will be South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia.
After invoking “green-haired freaks,” he then said in an aside it “may not be fair to the green-haired freaks” to associate them with Democrats.
Cruz peppered his speech with frequent asides meant to be humorous, as President Trump does. But while Trump’s asides usually appear to be spontaneous, which is why they often have little to do with the subject of his speech, Cruz’s asides appeared to be prepared and well-rehearsed. And unlike Trump, Cruz laughed at his own jokes.
According to Cruz, “we are literally seeing a communist takeover of the Democrat Party. We’re seeing the Democrat Party taken over by communists and Islamists.”
He said, “Right now, today, Comrade Mamdani is the most dangerous and the most powerful Democrat in America. And you’re seeing in race after race after race open Marxists — I’m not calling them communists, they call themselves communists – winning primaries in New York City, in Michigan, in Colorado, in Florida, in Oklahoma…”
He then broke off for an aside that invoked a well-known homophobic joke about Oklahoma. Both Cruz and the audience laughed at the aside.
Cruz, who earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and then attended Harvard Law School, knows the difference between Democratic Socialists and communists. He also knows no self-proclaimed communist has won a primary. As for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his latest announced project is a dedicated repair team to fix problems at the city’s playgrounds.
Cruz also knows Islamists are not taking over the Democratic Party, and that actual Islamists and communists have diametrically opposite goals, one religious and the other aggressively secular. Still, he tried to sell his idea of this fictitious menace in this year’s election, by giving a practiced folksy twist to the “they hate us for our freedoms” of the George W. Bush era.
“We’re seeing the Marxists and Islamists come together because they hate the same people, and they is us [sic],” he said.
Despite making repeated false claims in his speech, Cruz went on to denounce Democrats as liars.
He said, “this is what the left does, they lie.”
“Here’s the dynamic that’s at play in America. Democrats win when they effectively obfuscate what they believe. Republicans win when we effectively communicate what we believe.”
Much of Cruz’s speech focused on what Congress has done over the last two years. He complained that the media has not given Republicans enough credit for their accomplishments. He boasted about his work on President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Much of Cruz’s speech sounded like a presidential candidate in the Iowa Republican Caucus.
Cruz did encourage the donors to vote for all the Republican candidates on the ballot, although the senator did mistakenly call Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks “Mariette” when he was listing the candidates by first name. And he encouraged everyone to vote for Ashley Hinson 10 times, explaining he meant that each voter should get nine friends to vote for her.
At the close of his speech, Cruz evoked a dark vision of what a communist takeover of the United States would be like if the imaginary communists he was stoking fears about took power.
“Many of you all know my father, Pastor Rafael Cruz,” Cruz said. “My dad’s my hero. He’s 87, he’s doing great. Still got the energy of a teenager. Chuck Schumer calls him a youngster. Both of them, I think, have Duracell batteries or something.”
Cruz had apparently confused Chuck Schumer with Chuck Grassley, the 92-year-old senator, who was at the BBQ Bash. Schumer is more than a decade younger than Rafael Cruz. The elder Cruz is an immigrant from Cuba, who worked in the oil industry before becoming a salesman for a multi-level-marketing company that sells health supplements. He became a pastor in 2004.
“But as you may remember, my dad was born in Cuba,” Cruz said solemnly. “And he grew up in Cuba. We’re seeing a rise of communism here right now and communism is not abstract or theoretical.”
Cruz then invoked the dark history of prison systems in communist regimes from the defunct Soviet Union to North Korea.
“My dad when he was 17 was thrown in prison in Cuba,” Cruz said. “My dad was tortured in Cuba.”
It’s true that Rafael Cruz was imprisoned and tortured as a teenager in Cuba. But that happened years before the communist takeover, under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who encouraged both American corporations and the mafia to bring their businesses to Cuba. Batista did not make a sharp distinction between legal and illegal American businesses.
By the time Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Rafael Cruz was living in the United States. He even initially spoke out in favor of Castro, though he later said he regretted that.
Sen. Cruz did not include any of that information in his remarks, leaving the audience with the impression his father had been imprisoned and tortured by communists. It was an odd way for someone who complained about his political opponent engaging in obfuscation to conclude a speech.
