President Donald Trump visits a restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa, Tuesday. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

CLIVE, Iowa (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday made his first big pitch ahead of this year’s midterm elections on his administration’s economic performance, even as his administration remains mired in the fallout in Minneapolis over a second fatal shooting by federal immigration officers this month.

Trump gave a speech in a suburb of Des Moines where he talked up the tax cuts he signed into law last year and took credit for the soaring performance of the stock market, saying that he “made a lot of people rich,” including those “that I don’t even like.”

The president also slipped into the third person to tell Iowans, who are expected to reflect their feelings on his presidency when they vote in two highly competitive congressional races this year, that, “Just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming.”

“Incomes are rising. Investment is soaring, Inflation has been defeated,” he declared.

The trip for the Republican president was part of a White House push to focus more on affordability ahead of elections in November that will determine control of Congress.

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 economic issues facing everyday Americans — an effort that keeps getting diverted by crisis.

On the ground in Iowa, Trump first made a stop at a local restaurant, where he met some locals and sat for an interview with Fox News Channel — in which he said he was attempting to “de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota.

The latest effort comes as the Trump administration is grappling with the weekend shooting death of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse killed by federal agents in Iowa’s northern neighbor. 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, Trump said he was waiting until an investigation into the shooting was complete.

Trump, speaking on Tuesday in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines, talked up the wide-ranging tariffs he imposed on nearly all U.S. trading partners. He also promoted the deals he’s struck with drug makers to get them to lower costs on some prescription drugs.

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.