Legendary Gamecocks football coach Lou Holtz will address crowd at SC Trump rally
Lou Holtz, the legendary Notre Dame and South Carolina football coach who has called Donald Trump the “greatest president in my lifetime,” will speak at the former president’s South Carolina rally on Saturday.
The college football Hall of Famer and a longtime Trump political ally will be one of several Republican speakers at the “Save America” event, according to a Tuesday news release from Trump’s political action committee.
In his 34-year coaching career, Holtz became a titan in college football. Under his leadership, the Fighting Irish won the 1988 national title at the University of Notre Dame.
All told, he led six different college programs to bowl games and is an outspoken Trump backer.
In 2020, during an Oval Office ceremony, Trump awarded Holtz the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Holtz coached the Gamecocks from 1999 to 2004, where the team went 33-37. He took over a program that went 1-10 in 1998 under Brad Scott. After a rocky start in his first year at USC, where the team went 0-11, Holtz turned things around. He went on to lead the team to 17 wins and a pair of bowls the next two seasons. He retired from coaching in 2004.
In a 2016 speech during a luncheon at the Republican National Convention in Clevland, Holtz reportedly went on an anti-immigrant rant, where he referred to the influx of immigrants coming into the country as an “invasion” and demanded they do a better job of assimilating.
Ahead of his remarks at the time, Holtz also told Fox News he used to be a Democrat, “but the Democratic party left me.”
In addition to Holtz, other planned speakers at the rally include South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick, President of the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd, and Graham Allen, a conservative activist and media personality who dropped out of the South Carolina congressional race against Rep. Tom Rice.
In addition to those three speakers, a trio of Trump’s preferred Republican candidates in South Carolina will also take the stage.
Trump is expected to give a boost to Republicans in the Palmetto State at the upcoming rally, but especially to U.S. House candidates state Rep. Russell Fry, R-Horry, and former state Rep. Katie Arrington.
Both Fry and Arrington are challenging incumbent Republicans in the state that Trump has cast as being disloyal: Rep. Tom Rice and Rep. Nancy Mace.
Rice drew the former president’s ire after he voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Mace, R-Daniel Island, has also found herself at odds with the former president for remarks she made in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, when she became one of Trump’s most vocal and prolific critics within the Republican Party.
Gov. Henry McMaster, who, so far, faces no Republican challengers in his 2022 reelection bid, will also speak at the event.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 12:49 PM.
