U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden were hyped on Friday afternoon, yelling to the crowd at a Chippewa Falls “farm roundtable” about how great  President Donald Trump is for American farmers and how thrilling it was to have him here in Wisconsin. Was that flop sweat on their glistening foreheads? 

Trump’s approval rating hit a new low of 38% according to a Marquette poll released two days before his rural Wisconsin visit, with most respondents saying Democrats do a better job handling the economy. In rural Wisconsin, the Northern Ag Network reports, high fuel and fertilizer prices have been weighing heavily on farmers ever since Trump began his protracted military entanglement in Iran, while farm income is down and projected to drop further this year.

Van Orden, who is trying to hold onto his 3rd Congressional District seat and Tiffany, who wants to be Wisconsin’s next governor, have been faithful to Trump, voting for his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” with its historic cuts to Medicaid and food assistance that will fall especially hard on rural areas. The five-year, $50 billion rural healthcare fund added to the bill in the U.S. Senate — which Van Orden touted at the Chippewa Falls event — will not come close to making up for the OBBA’s $137 billion in permanent Medicaid cuts to rural areas, according to KFF health policy research. Those cuts will lead to the closure of rural hospitals and, combined with the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, will leave an estimated 30,000 Wisconsinites without healthcare. 

Trump’s visit to Wisconsin was a kind of Hail Mary. “Who’s excited that Donald J. Trump is here?” Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins shouted hoarsely. “Can I get an amen?” 

It was not an intellectual appeal. As Henry Redman reports, the so-called roundtable mostly consisted of a meandering speech by Trump, who insulted Democrats, mocked former President Joe Biden and showed pictures of his revamp of the Washington, D.C. reflecting pool. Instead of policy, the event offered vibes. But vibes can only do so much to overcome the cold, hard economic reality confronting rural voters.

Tiffany and Van Orden, who helped inflict Trump’s disastrous policies on rural Wisconsinites, are hoping Trump’s star power will propel them to victory. 

Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming took a stab at justifying the cognitive dissonance that will require of Republican voters, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump is forcing them to go through pain now so that he can fix long-term structural problems and bring them future prosperity. 

It was a pretty good try. Wisconsin farmers have demonstrated tremendous resilience in the face of brutal economic cycles. Those who are still around have persevered as more than half of the state’s dairy farms disappeared over the last two decades, through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump has denounced the global trade deals embraced by both political parties and promised to stop global trade from harming U.S. workers and farmers. For people who lived through massive consolidation, vertical integration and the commodification of farm products that sent prices plummeting, major structural change, even if it involves some short-term pain, sounds good. But how much longer can those early promises stay fresh? And how much faith do voters have that Trump really has a long-term plan? 

In Chippewa Falls, Trump spent a lot of time bragging about better than expected recent jobs numbers and ignoring underlying weaknesses in the economy that are a danger sign. He complained that the stock market didn’t share his rosy outlook. And he crowed about stopping illegal immigration, telling Wisconsin farmers who rely heavily on immigrant labor that he has stopped “people from mental institutions” and “murderers” from coming across the border. Wisconsin farmers are the wrong crowd for that red meat.

The most significant thing Trump said, before rushing through the brief “roundtable” section of the program, leaving just enough time for the assembled Republican politicians, two athletes, a beer company executive and one farmer to shower him with praise, was a promise of a massive farm subsidy. “I got $28 billion for the farmers in the first term,” he said, referring to the Market Facilitation Program that paid out big checks to farmers just before the 2020 election, to offset the effects of tariffs and trade wars. Once again, he said, he’s  “working on something” to help farmers, “because what happened to you was artificial.” 

Van Orden and Tiffany are hoping that will be enough to stave off reality a little bit longer.

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President Donald Trump held a roundtable discussion Friday at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls to tout his administration’s efforts to help farmers. 

Trump’s visit is his first to Wisconsin during this year’s election season. First to take the stage on Friday were U.S. Reps. Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany, signaling the importance of the 3rd Congressional District and the Wisconsin gubernatorial contest  for Republicans this year. 

Despite Trump’s waning approval ratings, Van Orden and Tiffany tied themselves to the president, effusively praising him.

Trump appeared on stage for the roundtable with both congressmen as well as U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, farm owner Ken Custer, Jake Leinenkugel, Olympic speed skater Jordan Stolz and Joe Thomas, a Hall of Fame former NFL player who played for UW-Madison and now owns a western Wisconsin beef farm. 

Despite its billing as a roundtable discussion of agriculture policy, Trump spoke for more than 40 minutes straight, at times appearing to read from a script and at others riffing on a number of favorite topics including former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, “Dumbocrats in Congress,” the allegedly “rigged” 2020 presidential election, transgender people, his multi-million dollar D.C. renovation projects and the southern border. 

“These are some very sick puppies that I’m looking at that are running for office and on the other side,” Trump said. “I call them the Dumocrats, D-U-M, you take out the B, a lot of people don’t know, dumb has a b, a lot of people don’t know. You take out the b and change the E, you put the you and you have a Dumocrat, but they are, their policy is just outstandingly bad, and it’s really bad for the farmer, because we were having record stuff, and then we had to put out a fire, we had to extinguish a nuclear weapon.” 

With six months until November’s midterm elections, many of Trump’s signature policies have directly affected the bottom line of Wisconsin farmers. Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran have greatly increased the cost of essentials such as fertilizer and gas while limiting access to foreign markets for corn and soybeans. In western Wisconsin communities close to where he appeared on Friday, Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota’s Twin Cities extended into the Dairy State, directly striking the undocumented migrant labor the region’s farmers rely on. 

“If anybody you hear says that Donald Trump doesn’t care about the farmers, you can look him straight in the eye and tell him that’s a pile of manure, because the man is right back there,” Van Orden said. “We’re going to make sure our farmers don’t have to wring their hands at night because they’re worried about paying bills.” 

Trump and other speakers promised that the administration and congressional Republicans are working to ease the burden on American farmers, but offered little in the way of concrete proposals for how fertilizer, seed, gas and equipment will get cheaper or how milk, corn and soybeans will get easier to sell. 

“Your fertilizer prices are going to go way down, just like they were four months ago,” Trump said. “Your fertilizer is down, your energy’s down, your oil, your gas is all coming way down. And frankly, I thought it would go much higher than it did.” 

In the days leading up to Friday’s event Democratic politicians and Democratic-aligned groups rolled out a series of tours, roundtables and online events to highlight complaints about administration policies on all manner of things. 

“Wisconsin farmers do backbreaking work to produce world-class products that feed the world and drive our rural economies. President Trump came into office promising to support our farmers, but instead has taken every opportunity to jack up their costs, limit their customers, and cut into their margins,” U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said in a statement. “Between Donald Trump’s trade war, unnecessary war in Iran, and attacks on our health care system, Wisconsin farmers are paying more for everything, and Donald Trump has no solutions to the problems he’s caused. As President Trump visits Wisconsin, he owes our farmers more than lip service – they need real relief from the high costs they are paying.”

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In the 2024 election, Republican messaging that marginalized transgender Americans and attacked Democrats got widespread attention.

Opinion is divided among political analysts about whether anti-trans messaging contributed to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s narrow loss — about 29,000 votes in Wisconsin and about a 1.5% margin nationwide — or was irrelevant. 

A 2023 Marquette University Law School poll found that a majority of respondents favored protecting trans people against workplace discrimination, but 70% also believed athletes should be required to play sports on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth. 

But whether or not the strategy helped seal Donald Trump’s victory two years ago, Republican candidates in Wisconsin have been leaning into messaging that targets transgender and nonbinary people.

Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove), whose adult son is transgender, sees little reason to “rehash” the 2024 election. “I think it’s always important to make sure that we are advocating for our trans community and for kids and speaking out against hate,” she said. “I think the bigger concern is why a party feels the need to attack our trans kids and use that as an issue to rile up part of their base ultimately.”

Transgender individuals account for less than 1% of the adult Wisconsin population, about 36,000 people, and 3.3% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, fewer than 13,000 people — or 180 per county. The Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles Law School calculated those estimates based on survey data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected between 2021 and 2023.

The Republican majority in the state Legislature has passed bills that would bar gender-affirming care for young people and ban kids from playing on sports teams that didn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth or their biological sex. Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly vetoed those measures.

“We’ve seen this in the Legislature, that by somehow going after children and bullying them is something that they see as a winning issue,” Ratcliff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And that grown adults think it’s OK to bully kids is just gross.”

Meanwhile, with Trump’s inauguration to a second term, federal policy has turned against transgender people and also against a more expansive understanding of gender.

During the Wisconsin Republican convention in Wisconsin Dells on May 16, speakers attacked the transgender population, particularly youth, sounding the alarm about the possibility of trans girls playing high school sports, mocking the use of inclusive language and promoting the  policing of bathrooms. 

Republican nominee for governor Tom Tiffany opened his speech by asking the delegates, “Are you ready for a governor that’s going to protect girls’ sports?”

Sen. Ron Johnson inveighed against “Biological males competing against our little girls in sports. Biological males invading their locker rooms, their showers, their bathrooms.” He as well as former Gov. Scott Walker falsely claimed that minors identified as transgender can be subjected to surgical procedures.

And a May 19 press release by Republican press secretary Zach Bannon falsely claimed that more than 90 lawmakers were “emphasizing their support of sex-change surgeries for minors” in an open letter to two leading Wisconsin hospital systems.

The false claim was repeated three times in the press release, which attacked Democrats in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District who are running in the party’s primary to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden. 

The letter called on the healthcare providers, Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa and UW Health in Madison, to resume gender-affirming care for minors, which both suspended early this year following threats to federal medical dollars from the Trump administration.

That form of care does not include surgery, however. A Children’s Wisconsin spokesperson said medical treatment prior to the suspension of care involved medication, and that Children’s still provides mental health and behavioral care. 

“UW Health does not offer gender-affirming surgery to minors,” said Sara Benzel, a spokesperson for the Madison-based system.

Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that for the youngest children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a deep-seated sense that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex — the first step is extensive counseling with a therapist.

Gender-affirming care “is also age-appropriate, and this is the part that I think people miss all the time,” Swetz said in a recent interview.  “There are no medical interventions until puberty for gender-affirming care.”

Interventions at puberty can involve medication but not surgery, Swetz said. Those can include hormone treatment to delay puberty and to redirect the body’s development.

“But that is all age-appropriate, and highly individualized, just like all good medical care is with the doctor,” Swetz said. “And always with full consent of parents and guardians. When we are talking about gender-affirming care for trans youth, that’s what we’re talking about. Not what the other side would like to pretend.”

Bannon did not respond to a Wisconsin Examiner email message seeking an explanation for the false statements in his press release.

A federal judge in April blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. The judge’s order said the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the authority to override professional standards of care or to deny funding to healthcare providers following those standards.

Since then some health providers in other states, including Children’s Minnesota hospital, have resumed providing gender-affirming care for minors.

Both UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin said they sympathized with patients who had been undergoing that care and their families, but that they believe they would remain in legal jeopardy if they resume care involving medication.

Ratcliff said that as someone whose family has gone through the experience of addressing the needs of a transgender child, it was important to her “to make sure that all trans kids and the trans community know that there are people in the Capitol that care about our trans community, that see them, that are fighting for them, and that we can push back again and fight back against all the hateful rhetoric toward our trans community.”

She said she believes Republicans are ramping up  attacks on trans people as a deflection from the economic squeeze voters are feeling.

“We know that everyday costs are going up and they aren’t putting forward policies that actually help everyday lives of Americans or Wisconsinites,” Ratcliff said. “My child being trans is not causing these prices to go up. My child’s healthcare is not causing any difference in people’s lives except for my child’s life.”

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U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany said at an event Tuesday in Madison that if elected governor he’d return the state’s current budget surplus to taxpayers while also cutting property taxes, eliminating taxes on tips and overtime and overturning Gov. Tony Evers’ 400-year school funding increase while also increasing the rate at which public schools are reimbursed for special education services. 

Tiffany said he’d do all of that even though he has not “penciled out in detail” how he’d pay for it all. At the event Tuesday hosted at the Madison Club by WisPolitics.com, Tiffany repeatedly lamented “Madison math” that makes people ask what will be cut from the state budget if lawmakers cut taxes, reducing state revenue. 

Several times during the moderated interview and to reporters after the event, Tiffany compared the state budget process to household budgeting. 

“Families figure out what their priorities are, and then they spend accordingly,” he said. “Education is going to be one of my priorities. Transportation will be a priority. Healthcare is going to be a priority. Those things take first call on the budget, and then when we get down to the wants, if some of them fall off, so be it. We’re going to make sure that we take care of the basics first.”

Tiffany is running for governor during a midterm election cycle in which Democrats are planning for the possibility that they can hold trifecta control of Wisconsin’s government for the first time in more than 15 years. President Donald Trump’s declining approval rating, the national political landscape and new voting maps that could end years of Republican legislative control mean that Tiffany is campaigning against the political current. 

Repeating a line from his speech at the Republican Party of Wisconsin convention earlier this month, Tiffany said he was running for governor rather than continuing to hold his safe Republican seat in Congress because he wants to reverse what he sees as a “state in decline.” 

Loyalty

Tiffany, who was first elected to the Legislature in 2010 and then elected to represent northern Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District in 2020, said “people who know” him know that he’s always been loyal first to the people of Wisconsin rather than the Republican executives — former Gov. Scott Walker and Trump — he’s worked with. 

Tiffany is a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus and has rarely broken from Trump while in Congress. Following the 2020 presidential election, Tiffany joined Republican efforts to overturn Trump’s loss. Last week, he told reporters he still had concerns about “improprieties” in the administration of the 2020 election. 

On Tuesday, Tiffany wouldn’t say that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, only that Biden was the president from 2021 until 2025. He said that he had concerns about the administration of the election in “a number of states.” 

“We should make sure that those things that were done wrong did not unduly damage that election,” he said. “On January 6 of 2021 it was decided by the Congress that Joe Biden won the presidency, and he became president … and I accepted that. I referred to him as President Biden, and, but I gotta tell you, it was a bad time for the United States of America when you had 10 million people that came in illegally, when we lost our energy independence, when we tucked tail and ran in Afghanistan … it was not a good period of time, but he was president for those four years.” 

Tiffany said he was still “studying the details” of the U.S. Department of Justice’s $1.776 billion slush fund for compensating people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But he said he didn’t think people who assaulted law enforcement officers should receive any of that money. 

Asked to point to other examples in which he disagrees with Trump, he said he didn’t believe the federal government should allow more Chinese students to attend American public universities such as the University of Wisconsin. 

During the audience question portion of the event, Tiffany was asked about the undocumented workers who make up a large portion of the state’s dairy workforce. Tiffany responded by criticizing Biden-era immigration policy, attacking “sanctuary” policies and claiming that the national decline in violent crime is because of Trump’s crackdown on immigration. 

But Tiffany wouldn’t say if Immigration and Customs Enforcement went too far during its occupation of the Democratic-run cities Chicago, Minnesota and Los Angeles. 

“The President made a decision that he thought that things should be done differently after what happened in Minneapolis, and I think that decision will be born out here as we go forward,” he said. “But remember, Minnesota was an anomaly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement works very closely with law enforcement. Here’s what I would do: I would make sure that local, county and state law enforcement works closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and coordinate their efforts to make sure what happened in Minnesota does not happen in Wisconsin.” 

Madison issues 

Tiffany also weighed in on a number of issues that lawmakers in Madison have taken up this year, including the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program, the legalization of online sports betting and the growth of hyperscale data centers in the state. 

On the stewardship program, which is set to expire at the end of June after legislators failed to reach a deal on extending it past 2026, Tiffany said he’d sign a bill to re-authorize the program if it focuses on maintaining “what we have” rather than acquiring new state land. Tiffany in recent years has often joined Republican state lawmakers in opposing land conservation projects in the northern part of the state through the program. 

Earlier this year, lawmakers enacted a law that would allow the state’s Native American tribes to begin operating online sports betting operations. The bill will require the state’s gambling compacts with the tribes to be re-negotiated. 

Tiffany said he doesn’t support expanding gambling opportunities in the state but that he’d “have to review the details” of the law to weigh in on the compact negotiations. 

Over the past year, the construction of massive AI data centers has become one of the most potent political issues in the state. Tiffany said that the controversial data centers in Port Washington, Mount Pleasant and Beaver Dam have taught the state lessons on how to move forward. He said he would repeal a provision included in the 2023-25 state budget that exempted data center construction costs from the state sales tax, prevent data centers from being built on “productive farmland,” work to keep utility rates stable and prevent the tech companies building the data centers from making local governments sign non-disclosure agreements. 

However he wouldn’t say if legislation would be required to achieve those goals, only saying that “my Public Service Commission” would handle it.

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As the long tail of the 2020 presidential election continues to reverberate through Wisconsin politics, a bipartisan pair of former elected officials sought to deliver a message of trust Tuesday in how the state counts votes and runs elections.

Meanwhile, the official Republican nominee for governor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, has been ramping up his campaign refusing to admit President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, including in Wisconsin.

Former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appeared at Viterbo University in La Crosse Tuesday as representatives of the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan multi-state initiative to build trust in the country’s election systems. 

“The 2020 election has been litigated and relitigated and relitigated over and over again, and nothing has changed,” Barrett said. 

A day earlier, fresh off winning the GOP endorsement at the party’s weekend convention, Tiffany was asked at a campaign stop in Elm Grove Monday if Biden won the 2020 election. He replied that “the problem with the 2020 election was the improprieties that happened.” 

It was one of multiple appearances in which Tiffany declined to directly engage the outcome of the 2020 race.

Trump’s endorsement of Tiffany earlier this year helped clear out the Republican primary field for the three-term congressman. 

Tiffany was also one of the Wisconsin congressional delegation’s most ardent election deniers following Trump’s 2020 loss — which was affirmed by several reviews, recounts, investigations, audits and lawsuits in the years since. 

On Jan. 6, 2021, Tiffany voted against certifying election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania and told reporters at the time that he would have voted to not accept Wisconsin’s results as well. He also supported a lawsuit from the state of Texas that sought to overturn the election results of Wisconsin and three other states. 

The effort from right-wing congressional Republicans to reject the electoral votes for Biden from swing states was one of the mechanisms that led directly to the attack on the U.S. Capitol that day. 

In the days following the Jan. 6 attack, Tiffany appeared at a closed door rally with other right-wing figures who called for “war.” 

Tiffany’s comments come as the Trump administration has increased its effort to use the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to relitigate the 2020 election. Swing states across the country have seen increased scrutiny surrounding previously debunked 2020 allegations and in recent weeks the FBI has begun digging into Wisconsin’s election administration — including questioning Milwaukee election workers. 

On Monday, Tiffany supported the FBI’s work. 

“Whatever they’re searching for, the investigation should be allowed to continue and let’s find out what happened there,” Tiffany told reporters. “If there’s improprieties that happened then there should be charges filed. If not, then you let the investigation cease.”

In La Crosse on Tuesday, Van Hollen and Barrett both lamented the FBI sticking its nose into an issue that’s already been closed. Barrett called the investigation a “fishing expedition” while Van Hollen criticized the waste of FBI time. 

“There are a lot of better uses for our FBI resources right now, so I don’t think that that is a great use of our resources,” Van Hollen said. 

The former attorney general also said the agency’s investigation didn’t concern him. 

“I don’t think the FBI is going to turn out and fabricate something, and if they, for some reason, uncovered something that we hadn’t known in the past, by all means, we want to make sure to enforce our laws as well, to make sure that people have confidence in our election system,” Van Hollen said. “So, is it something that I think is necessary? No. Do I think we should be concerned? Not necessarily.”

The Democracy Defense Project continues previous work done by state and local election officials across Wisconsin who have sought to respond to election conspiracy theories with basic facts about the state’s election system. 

During their visit to La Crosse, Barrett and Van Hollen highlighted Wisconsin’s decentralized election system in which local clerks across the state do the brunt of the work to administer the state’s elections and noted that those local officials are broadly trusted by their communities. 

“The general public believes very strongly in the folks in this room and other people who are running their local elections,” Van Hollen said, citing polling data from the project. “They believe you’re doing a good job, they recognize that you’re doing a nonpartisan job, a very important job.”

Polling shows that a majority of voters “have great respect for the people who are working the polls at a local level — yet they don’t necessarily have a belief that we have election integrity, which seems to me to be a bit of an oxymoron,” Van Hollen added. 

Lack of information is a primary culprit, he said. 

Many people are “just not informed as to the way our elections are run, and when we have so much misinformation out there,” Van Hollen said.

While calling it a problem involving Democrats as well as Republicans, he acknowledged Republicans have been a bigger contributor to the problem. 

“It comes from both political parties of late, certainly a lot more from my party,” Van Hollen said, “which has probably given rise to everybody’s desire to finally step forward and try to inform the public a little more.”

At the Wisconsin Republican Party convention at Kalahari in Wisconsin Dells Saturday, elected officials, party leaders and former governors repeatedly warned that if Democrats do well in this year’s midterm elections they will turn the state into its more liberal neighbor of Minnesota. 

“Look at Minnesota, if you must, look at where taxpayers have been fleeced of millions of dollars by Democrat politicians that chose to look the other way, take a look at Illinois, with their high tax rates, and their politicians that have passed out freebies to illegal aliens, and make no mistake, those same people, they have this state in their sights, and they want Wisconsin to be their next victim,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who was crowned Saturday as the party’s nominee for governor. 

The warning comes after 15 years in which Republicans have controlled majorities in the state Legislature and hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts while Republicans hold both houses of Congress and the presidency. In his speech, Tiffany painted a Wisconsin in decline. 

“This election is about more than politics. It’s about whether Wisconsin is going to continue down this path of decline,” he said.

The national political landscape, President Donald Trump’s sinking approval rating, a faltering economy and a less gerrymandered legislative map have Democrats dreaming of trifecta control of state government. 

“The one thing I am scared about this election is the Democrats are motivated, and they truly believe we’re on the verge of a fascist day or something,” U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman said. “And because they are so motivated — you see it in the number of protests out there — we have got to match them. To be honest, we’re not matching them quite yet, but they do believe they’re on that verge of losing America, and that that is why they have so many volunteers out there, so many people who are gathering signatures. We have got to find a way to match that enthusiasm.”

State party chair Brian Schimming said Saturday that to staunch that blue wave, Republicans need to lean into “kitchen table issues.” 

“Because wherever we are in this state on the big issues, the big kitchen table issues, the voters are with us,” said Schimming, who in recent weeks has faced internal efforts to oust him. 

During a panel discussion of current and former Republican legislators, Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said that the state’s residents are “feeling the economy.”

“When you look at what’s going on right now, it is affordability, it truly is,” Kurtz said. “Let’s not sugarcoat that. Everybody, at least in my district, we’re feeling the economy. So that’s where I think we, as Republicans, we have to say what we have done and what we will continue to do.”

But from the convention stage, officials such as Tiffany, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, former Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden, railed against alleged election fraud, undocumented immigrants, trained protesters fighting the Trump administration and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. 

“The left never, never talks about the victims of crime from illegal immigrants,” Johnson said. “But they take those two individuals who they trained and encouraged, put themselves into harm’s way, they died, and they turned them into martyrs and use them as an excuse to defund ICE, defund CBP, refuse to fund DHS, and put all of America, or continue to keep America at risk.”

Repeatedly, speakers highlighted their focus on eliminating protections for transgender people and preventing trans people of all ages from receiving gender-affirming care. 

“Are you ready for a governor that calls moms moms not inseminated persons? Are you ready for a governor that’s going to protect girls’ sports?” Tiffany said in the opening line of his speech. 

Throughout the day, party officials sought to paint Wisconsin Democrats as “radicals” who want to turn the country socialist. 

“The Democrat candidates leave the answer simple: the government should provide,” said Schoemann, who briefly ran in the Republican primary for governor but dropped out after Trump endorsed Tiffany. “They want a government that provides your groceries, your education, your health care, your child care. Should I keep going?”

Speakers bashed the Democratic vision for a government that can solve people’s problems — labeling Wisconsin Democrats such as Attorney General Josh Kaul and state Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) as socialists. State Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), who has been leading the polls in the Democratic primary for governor and actually is a Democratic Socialist, was also a frequent target. 

Speakers also often criticized Democratic proposals to raise income taxes on the state’s millionaires, billionaires and corporations to offset rising property taxes. 

In his often meandering 30-minute speech, Johnson argued that if Democrats win back a majority in the U.S. Senate this fall, they’ll use that power to end the Senate filibuster rule to “turn America into a one-party nation.” 

So, he said, to preempt that effort, Republicans should end the filibuster this summer in order to pass the SAVE Act instituting much stricter rules on voting. 

“We better end it first, so we can save this nation,” he said. “If we were to end it, we wouldn’t be doing it to turn this into a one-party Republican party nation. No, we would do it to preserve this nation, to preserve voter integrity, so that no matter who wins we have the confidence that that’s a legitimate result.”

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Four Republican members of Congress, including gubernatorial frontrunner Tom Tiffany, have introduced a bill that would exempt vehicles in southeast Wisconsin from federally mandated emissions testing. 

The bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) and co-sponsored by Reps. Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald and Tiffany. Tiffany, the only member whose district does not include the affected area of Milwaukee, Kenosha, Ozaukee, Racine, Sheboygan, Washington and Waukesha counties, also brought the issue up on the campaign trail late last month. 

Seven Wisconsin counties, including Milwaukee, are designated ozone nonattainment areas by the EPA under the Clean Air Act, which subjects vehicle owners in the area to additional regulations such as biennial emissions testing. Federal law allows a state to apply for the waiver if it can prove air pollution originates from out-of-state. 

The bill authors point to a Department of Natural Resources report that showed 10% of the ozone measured in the area comes from Wisconsin while more than a third of it comes across Lake Michigan from Illinois and Indiana. 

“Because of outdated federal rules, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin drivers in seven counties are forced to complete emissions tests every two years just to renew their registration,” Tiffany said in a statement. “Wisconsin families should not be punished with costly and time-consuming mandates because of pollution drifting in from Illinois and Indiana.”

Studies have shown the highest sources of ozone in the region come from the urban centers of Chicago and Milwaukee.

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