Toledo, Ohio: US President Donald Trump opened his re-election year in the Midwest on Friday, hoping to translate his confrontation with Iran into strength on the campaign trail in a battleground region that may decide the winner of the presidential race in November.

For his first campaign rally of 2020, Trump returned to Ohio, where he has devoted much of his travel over the past three years hoping to cement support that will be crucial to rebuilding the Electoral College coalition he assembled in 2016. But job growth has stalled in the state, and Democrats are accusing him of failing to live up to his promise of restoring manufacturing in the region.

Donald Trump at the Toledo rally: claimed he "won" a popularity context against the 16th US president Abraham Lincoln. Credit:AP

Trump celebrated his decision to order a drone strike killing Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's elite security forces, calling him "the world's top terrorist" and insisting that he was planning to attack American embassies. "He was a bad guy," Trump told a cheering crowd at the Huntington Centre, a minor-league hockey arena. "He was a bloodthirsty terror and he's no longer a terror. He's dead." He argued he served up "American justice" by ordering a drone strike to take out Soleimani.

Hours after the House of Representatives passed a resolution intended to limit Trump's ability to go to war with Iran, the President said Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her priorities wrong. "I see the radical left Democrats have expressed outrage over the termination of this terrorist," he said. "Instead, they should be outraged by Soleimani's savage crimes."