IOWA CITY — A long and arduous season delivers several moments where a team must snap and clear from what just happened, good or bad. Iowa women’s basketball finds itself in that exact position.

After a stretch that paired excitement with devastation, the No. 8 Hawkeyes head out west for maybe their trickiest trip of the season. The Los Angeles swing begins with a Jan. 29 showdown at USC (8 p.m. CT, Peacock), followed by a Feb. 1 duel at No. 2 UCLA (3 p.m. CT, FOX).

Though these two schools have only been in the Big Ten a year and change, no conference squad has completed a perfect sweep of a California trip when knocking out the two matchups together. Considering UCLA has national-title aspirations as one of the best teams in the country, there’s even more pressure for the Hawkeyes to start this trip with a victory over the Trojans.

With that, here are three things to watch in Iowa vs. USC.

Can Iowa mentally move on from a whirlwind week that covered both ends of the emotional spectrum?

President Donald Trump kicked off an aggressive midterm push Tuesday night in Iowa, warning supporters that losing control of Congress would jeopardize his tax cuts, border policies and broader second-term agenda as he urged Republicans to turn out and “win the midterms.”

“If we lose the midterms, you’ll lose so many of the things that we’re talking about, so many of the assets that we’re talking about, so many of the tax cuts that we’re talking about, and it would lead to very bad things,” Trump said during remarks that framed the 2026 midterm elections as a test of his presidency.

Speaking after Reps. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, and Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, Trump said holding both chambers of Congress was critical to advancing his agenda.

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“We got to win the midterms. That means Senate. And it means House. We gotta win,” he told the crowd.

Trump explicitly cast the Iowa stop as the opening act of his midterm campaign, arguing that presidents who fail to campaign aggressively often lose ground in off-year elections.

“I’m here because we’re starting the campaign to win the midterms. We have got to win the midterms,” he said. “The midterms are very important. We’re going to really work hard on winning the midterms.”

The president warned that a Democrat-led Congress would reverse his economic and border policies, telling supporters that control of Capitol Hill would determine whether his priorities survive. 

“If they won, this country would be cratering right now,” Trump said as he contrasted Republican and Democrat candidates. “We have candidates that roll with common sense. Not this craziness.”

Trump repeatedly tied the midterm stakes to his economic record in his speech, touting what he described as a dramatic turnaround in inflation, investment and job growth since returning to office. 

“Today, just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming. Incomes are rising. Investment is soaring. Inflation has been defeated,” he said. “Our border is closed, totally closed.”

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Trump credited tariffs and trade policy for increased domestic investment, saying his administration had secured what he called “commitments for a record-breaking $18 trillion.” 

He also praised companies like John Deere for expanding U.S. manufacturing and touted tax provisions he said would benefit seniors, tipped workers and employees who work overtime, pointing to “no tax on tips,” “no tax on overtime” and “no tax on Social Security for our seniors.”

At several points, Trump returned to immigration as a defining midterm issue, arguing that border security and deportation policies would be undone if Republicans lost control of Congress. 

“The worst is open borders,” he said. “We can never forget what that group of morons did to this country. We can never forget. And we’ve got to win the midterms.”

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Trump acknowledged the historical challenges facing the party in power during midterm elections but said aggressive campaigning could overcome them. 

“Even if you’re a good president … whoever wins the presidency has a hard time with the midterm,” Trump said. “But I campaigned hard. We got it. We got to win the midterms.”

Trump closed the political portion of his remarks with a direct call to action, urging supporters to mobilize to protect his agenda and elect Republican candidates up and down the ballot. 

“So, remember that you got to get out, and you got to vote,” he said.

The Iowa stop is part of a broader push by the White House to put the president on the road regularly ahead of the 2026 midterms. Administration officials have said Trump plans to make weekly appearances in states with key congressional races as Republicans work to defend narrow House and Senate majorities, with a particular focus on motivating core GOP voters who don’t always turn out in off-year elections or when the president’s name isn’t on the ballot.

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The president made clear that he views the elections not as a referendum on Congress but as a vote on the future of his presidency. 

“We got to win them,” he said of GOP candidates. “We have great candidates. Again, Senate and House. We got to win them.”

The White House referred Fox News Digital to President Trump’s remarks.

Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser and Emma Colton contributed to this reporting.

While in Iowa, the Republican president will make a stop at a local business and then deliver a speech on affordability, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The remarks will be at the Horizon Events Center in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines.

The trip will also highlight energy policy, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said last week. It’s part of the White House’s strategy to have Trump travel out of Washington once a week ahead of the midterm elections to focus on affordability issues facing everyday Americans — an effort that keeps getting diverted by crisis.

The latest comes as the Trump administration is grappling with the weekend shooting death of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse killed by federal agents in the neighboring state of Minnesota. Pretti had participated in protests following the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Even as some top administration officials moved quickly to malign Pretti, the White House said Monday that Trump was waiting until an investigation into the shooting was complete.

Trump was last in Iowa ahead of the July 4 holiday to kick off the United States’ upcoming 250th anniversary, which morphed largely into a celebration of his major spending and tax cut package hours after Congress had approved it.

Republicans are hoping that Trump’s visit to the state on Tuesday draws focus back to that tax bill, which will be a key part of their pitch as they ask voters to keep them in power in November.

“I invited President Trump back to Iowa to highlight the real progress we’ve made: delivering tax relief for working families, securing the border, and growing our economy,” Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, said in a statement in advance of his trip. “Now we’ve got to keep that momentum going and pass my affordable housing bill, deliver for Iowa’s energy producers, and bring down costs for working families.”

Trump’s affordability tour has taken him to Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina as the White House tries to marshal the president’s political power to appeal to voters in key swing states.

But Trump’s penchant for going off-script has sometimes taken the focus off cost-of-living issues and his administration’s plans for how to combat it. In Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump insisted that inflation was no longer a problem and that Democrats were using the term affordability as a “hoax” to hurt him. At that event, Trump also griped that immigrants arriving to the U.S. from “filthy” countries got more attention than his pledges to fight inflation.

Although it was a swing state just a little more than a decade ago, Iowa in recent years has been reliably Republican in national and statewide elections. Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points in 2024 against Democrat Kamala Harris.

Still, two of Iowa’s four congressional districts have been among the most competitive in the country and are expected to be again in this year’s midterm elections. Trump already has endorsed Republican Reps. Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Democrats, who landed three of Iowa’s four House seats in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term, see a prime opportunity to unseat Iowa incumbents.

This election will be the first since 1968 with open seats for both governor and U.S. senator at the top of the ticket after Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds and Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst opted out of reelection bids. The political shake-ups have rippled throughout the state, with Republican Reps. Randy Feenstra and Ashley Hinson seeking new offices for governor and for U.S. senator, respectively.

Democrats hope Rob Sand, the lone Democrat in statewide office who is running for governor, will make the entire state more competitive with his appeal to moderate and conservative voters and his $13 million in cash on hand.

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Kim reported from Washington.