President Donald Trump will travel to Minnesota on Monday for an event focused on tax cuts.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders confirmed the visit to a group of journalists who were traveling with the president to Texas on Wednesday, according to a pool report. The White House did not immediately release additional details about the visit.
Monday is April 15, the deadline for tax filing. Two Minnesota GOP operatives briefed on the event told the Star Tribune that the president will celebrate the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the 2017 Republican tax cut bill he signed into law.
Republicans consider that the most important legislative achievement of his first two years in office.
The tax cut legislation, which cut levies on corporations 40 percent while also reducing rates for families, was strenuously opposed by Democrats as a giveaway to the rich, and it has not won broad public support, according to polls.
The White House has not released the location for the Trump event. But the Minnesota GOP sources said it would be in the Twin Cities region. The FAA has posted a "VIP movement notification."
This will mark Trump's first official visit to Minnesota, though he has held political events in the state before. He visited Duluth and Rochester for political rallies in 2018 — both in legislative districts that Republicans ended up seizing from Democrats in last year's election.
The 45th president lost Minnesota to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 44,593 votes in 2016. Trump made only a last-minute stop in Minnesota ahead of the election. He has said since that he believes with one additional visit, he would have won the state.
Trump also vowed at both his rallies in the state last year that he would win Minnesota in 2020. Doing so would make him the first Republican since 1972 to pick up Minnesota's 10 electoral votes.
Since Trump last visited Minnesota, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has joined the Democratic race to challenge him. She has stressed the political importance of the Upper Midwest in the 2020 presidential campaign, given Trump's unexpected wins in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Klobuchar has yet to become a target of Trump's frequent political insults, but he has been publicly critical of Minnesota's new U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, an outspoken progressive Democrat who has become a lightning rod of GOP criticism.
Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in a prepared statement that Trump is coming "to sell a record of broken promises, lies, and attacks on families across our great state. It won't work."
Star Tribune staff writer Patrick Condon contributed to this story. J. Patrick Coolican • 651-925-5042
