“I will tell you, something very special happened today to me,” Zach Lahn told the audience of Republicans gathered at the downtown Hilton in Des Moines on Friday night. “A boy who grew up north of Sioux City in a small town of less than 300 people. I was endorsed for this campaign by President Donald J. Trump.”
Lahn was speaking at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner, its premier annual fundraiser. This year’s dinner promoted candidates running in the general election, such as Lahn and Ashley Hinson, and celebrated Gov. Kim Reynolds, who announced in April 2025 she would not run for reelection.
Trump’s endorsement came on Friday afternoon, just hours ahead of the dinner. If Lahn didn’t have the endorsement of the president it would have cast a shadow over the Iowa GOP’s biggest election year social event.
“Zach Lahn has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be the next Governor of Iowa – HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” Trump posted on his Truth Social account Friday afternoon. Six weeks earlier on Truth Social, the president posted, “Randy Feenstra has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be the next Governor of Iowa – RANDY WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
Trump’s belated endorsement of Feenstra on May 28 came five days before the June 2 primary election. Trump’s belated endorsement of Lahn on Friday came 38 days after Lahn beat Feenstra by 0.77 percentage points in that primary.
While Feenstra conceded and endorsed Lahn the night of the primary, Trump made no public comments on the primary results in the governor’s race until he was directly asked about it by a reporter nine days later. Trump didn’t appear to know Lahn’s name, referring to him as “the other man,” “the other person” or just generically as “the man.” Still, Trump did manage to suggest during that June 11 press event that he deserved credit for Lahn beating the candidate he actually endorsed.
“I, uh, the man running against him was all-Trump,” the president said, responding to the reporter who asked him if he regretted endorsing Feenstra.
As he concluded his somewhat rambling response, Trump claimed he endorsed Feenstra because he hadn’t been given the “proper information” about the Republican nominees for governor in Iowa.
“I probably would have endorsed the other person,” he said. “But — or not endorsed at all. But I would have endorsed the other person.”
“The other person was much more Trump, as you know, than Randy.”
Whoever drafted Trump’s post endorsing Lahn copied the post endorsing Feenstra almost word for word. The obvious recycling of the Feenstra post went unmentioned at the Lincoln Dinner.
Along with celebrating the endorsement, Lahn used his speech at the dinner to praise both Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds, and promise to build on their legacies if he’s elected governor.
“Our campaign is different,” Lahn told the crowd at the Hilton. “It’s about not just what’s at risk, but even more so what the opportunity is. And the opportunity that’s been given to me is not one that I take lightly. It’s building off of the work of the people that have came before me — Gov. Reynolds, Gov. Branstad, the legislature, the people that have taken the arrows.
“And I believe I am being put here for a time to take that mantle and to work to make Iowa the best place to raise a family, to start a business, to grow a farm, to build a community, to participate in your church — a better place than anywhere else in the United States of America.”
On Friday night, Lahn was promising to continue the work of Branstad and Reynolds, who between them have occupied the governor’s office for the last 15 years, and the legislature, which Republicans have controlled for the nine years, but on Friday morning, Lahn was attempting to portray himself as the anti-establishment candidate in the governor’s race.
During an interview on Iowa Press, which was taped on Friday morning, Lahn was asked about his repeated assertion that he’d stand up to the establishment. “Who do you think the establishment is in Iowa?” Brianne Pfannenstiel, chief politics reporter for the Des Moines Register, asked.
“I believe Rob Sand’s the establishment, just being quite frank,” Lahn said. “I mean, he’s been involved in this for over 20 years.”
Sand, of course, is the Democratic nominee for governor. Since 2023, he’s been the lone Democrat in statewide office, while Republicans filled all the other statewide elected offices and controlled both chambers of the Iowa Legislature. Sand is in his second term as State Auditor. He was first elected in 2018 and was reelected in 2022. Prior to that, he served as an assistant state attorney general, starting in September 2010.
Lahn did not explain why a Democrat in a Republican-controlled state government is part of the establishment or what he meant by his claim that Sand, who has served in government for 16 years, has “been involved in this for over 20 years.”
The Iowa Press interview happened before Trump’s eventual endorsement of Lahn. Neither the lack of a presidential endorsement more than a month after the primary, nor Trump’s inability to recall Lahn’s name in June, were mentioned during the interview.
