Republican front-runner Donald Trump is demonstrating once again that the usual rules of politics may not apply to him; he skipped the final Republican debate before Monday's Iowa caucuses, holding a competing event of his own at Drake University in Des Moines, where reporter Grace Rauh is on the campaign trail covering his run for the White House and filed a report.
Donald Trump is writing his own script in this presidential campaign; he skipped a major debate Thursday night, hosted by Fox News, after publicly feuding with an anchor there, Megyn Kelly.
Trump accused Kelly of treating him unfairly after she questioned him in an earlier debate about derogatory remarks he has made about women over the years.
He ditched the debate after Fox refused to remove her as the moderator.
"I didn't want to be here, I have to be honest. I wanted to be about five minutes away, and I've enjoyed that," Trump said at his event. "But you have to stick up for your rights. When you are treated badly, you have to stick up for your rights."
With the debate in his rearview mirror, Trump hastily organized his own event meant to rival the one on Fox.
"We had about 24 hours to put this together," he said.
The rally was meant to raise money for veterans, but the campaign did not say which veterans' organizations would get the funding.
There's been some arguments about whether it was a smart or risky move for Trump to drop out of the debate. He leads in recent polls in Iowa, and his absence arguably robbed his opponents of an opportunity to change the direction of the contest before the caucuses.
"Is it for me personally a good thing? A bad thing? Will I get more votes? Will I get less votes? Nobody knows, who the hell knows?" Trump said. "But it's for our vets, and you're going to like it because we raised over $5 million in one day."
Republican candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who won the two previous Iowa caucuses, joined Trump on stage. Neither qualified for the main debate.
"I'm supporting another candidate for president," Santorum said. "That doesn't mean we can't work together when it comes to helping our veterans."
Trump will be in New Hampshire on Friday, and he is slated to return to Iowa on Saturday for a final few days of campaigning before the caucuses Monday night.