Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee speak at Donald Trump's counter-debate event

Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee.

(Image credit: William Edwards/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 29 January 2016

After appearing at the Fox News Republican undercard debate in Des Moines, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee rushed across town to Drake University to attend a special event for veterans held by Donald Trump.

Trump announced his event to benefit veterans organizations earlier in the week, after he said he would not appear at the Fox News prime-time debate. Trump invited Santorum and Huckabee — both one-time winners of the Iowa caucuses — to speak, with Huckabee joking: "I had nothing to do at 8 o'clock tonight, this worked great for me."

Santorum made sure to stand in a way so he wasn't photographed with a Trump sign ("I'm supporting another candidate for president," he quipped), and said he wanted the money raised that night to go to making the Veterans Administration a "center of excellence." Huckabee said that while the men are rivals in the Republican race, "tonight, we are colleagues in unison standing here for the people who let us breathe every breath of free air we breathe, the veterans of the United States of America." He also said he was "grateful" to Trump for asking him to attend the event, adding that it "says something about him, that he would bring us here to his own event, because bigger even than this election is the fact that we wouldn't have free elections in this country if it wasn't for the people who stood between bullets and bombs and our freedom." Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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