“Even if you’re sick as a dog; even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it,” Donald Trump cheerfully assured the crowd, beaming at his people from underneath his white baseball cap bearing the legend “Trump Caucus Captain”.
This was on a glittering, unbearably cold Sunday morning last in an Indianola college hall on the fringes of Des Moines, Iowa. Many of those in attendance had stood in line in the perishing early morning before the doors opened, teeth chattering, pulses slowing but their mood joyous, euphoric. Still, the proposition must have made even his most fervent Trumpian loyalists conduct a quick mental calculation. Is a vote for The Donald actually worth dying for?
Hundreds of thousands of would-be Iowan Republicans certainly thought otherwise, electing to stay at home on one of the coldest January nights the state has recorded in decades.
The reasons were manifold: the (correct) assumption that the former president had the state sewn-up; an interstate road system in deep freeze. Plus, there was Monday Night Football. And despite the welter of anticipation generated by the main television news networks, there was, running through the farmland counties, an undeniable sense that the symbolic importance of the Iowa caucus is in remittance.
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The Democrats – the party whose candidates had first gleaned the potential profile and symbolism of a high return in the first state – elected not even to campaign this year. Of the three leading Republican candidates, Donald Trump had long established himself as the figure who could harvest their worries and help them return to a more idyllic version of America.
“We do talk about politics a good deal here,” says Pat Rynard, founder of the website iowastartingline.com. “But part of the reason Trump has done well, and other outsider candidates have done well, is that a lot of Iowans feels as though they have been left behind. Which is also a little funny because we get all this attention.
“But I do think that they are kind of right to be frustrated about things in that jobs aren’t paying as well as they used to, and is harder to come by and it does seem like bigger, more exciting things are happening in other parts of the country.
“So, I think Trump’s dominance in this state will continue just because he has been able to connect well with that frustration. One of the more interesting aspects of this is that the Iowa Republican establishment, with Governor Kim Reynolds leading the charge, have really turned their back on Trump. A lot of key figures have either openly or quietly turned their back – and it just hasn’t mattered.
“We are a left-leaning news outlet and I have made this point to Republicans. They defended Trump for so long, and they did so because it was politically advantageous to their own elections here in Iowa to keep that Trump base, that then when they got sick of him, it was too little too late.”
To be in Iowa, even for a few days, is to feel as though you’ve reached the heart of the interior. The week of snow, although beautiful, sort of ruined the caucuses because everyone retreated indoors. A man called Matt, who’d moved here from Chicago for studies, spoke of Des Moines in easier weather: the wide, straight streets filled with cyclists and the entire state alive with nature.
People are friendly, understated, modest. The cost of living is more attractive than in the big cities. Around the time of the 2016 caucuses, Politico published a lengthy profile of Des Moines, under the headline: How America’s Dullest City Got Cool. But it has always punched above its weight.
At the airport, a historical montage traces the rapid development from small airfield to the centre-point which Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, passed through during his historic 1959 visit; he wanted to witness first-hand the famed Iowan agricultural supremacy.
Pope John Paul II was another visitor and, because of Iowa’s political tradition, it has hosted frequent visits from US presidents. Photographs of a cowboy booted Bill Clinton sitting on a hay bale, of Obama and JFK sleeves rolled up testify to a beautiful idea where elite politics either deigned or was forced to bow to the will of small communities.
When Jimmy Carter began his campaign in 1975, three people showed up. Famously, he walked into a barber shop and announced his name and declared he was running for president. “Yeah,” the barber replied. “We were just laughing about that.” But over the next year, Carter made Iowa his own.
And even this January, there remained something appealing about the hoops through which elite political figures will jump to engage people.
On Monday evening, a few minutes before the statewide appointed hour of seven o’clock, voters began to arrive at the state historical museum. The same scene played itself out across Iowa. In the dimly lit foyer stood a skeletal display of a woolly mammoth. It seemed apt, given the temperature and also what is another defining theme of the 2024 election: the age of Trump and Biden.
It’s the one area where Nikki Haley, ex-South Carolina governor and former UN ambassador, has been willing to attack her party rival. But one of the many curious aspects of Trump’s rise has been his ability to cast himself as ageless. During his televised Town Hall on Wednesday night, he paid tribute to his late mother-in-law, Amalija Knav. Her grieving husband, Viktor, he said, was kind of a father “to us all, really”. It set a crafty generational distinction even though Trump is only a year younger than his mother-in-law.
Still, even his fiercest detractors must concede that Trump possesses a sort of trenchant energy and, of the candidates who will feature this year, he is comfortably the sharpest with retorts. In Ankeny early last week, Haley gave an imploring speech to a room crowded with locals and with the traipsing media crews. She was candid and to the point and is a clear, practised communicator.
But at a similar event a few days later, her talk was identical in both words, phrasing and inflection. One of the reasons Trump succeeds in front of an audience is that they never know what he is going to say next – partly because he doesn’t know either. And this time he has a polished campaign strategy, too.
Just before the ex-president appeared on the podium at Simpson College, the crowd were treated to a newly made video titled God Made Trump, a lofty montage starring the man himself with an atmospheric piano soundtrack and a voiceover that casts him in a providential light.
“I need somebody who can shape an axe but wield a sword, who had the courage to step foot in North Korea, who can make money from the tar of the sand, turn liquid to gold, who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation, will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon but then put in another 72 hours. So, God made Trump. God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers, call out the fake news for their tongues are as sharp as a serpent’s, the poison of vipers in on their lips and yet stop. So, God made Trump.”
On it goes, for almost three minutes, a peculiar mix of postmodern and Old Testament imagery. Although easily parodied on social media, it spoke to whom it was intended. And it emphasised the peculiar state of the Republican Party at the moment, and why the Iowa caucuses felt decided long before the big night.
“Candidates will keep coming to Iowa as long as Iowa is first for one of the parties,” Pat Rynard says. “And if it stays first for the Republicans, you will see candidates coming.
“But I think the Iowa element, the local element, has been lost in this cycle. And it is part of the ongoing degradation of local campaigning being less and less important. The nationalisation of our politics – how so much of it plays out online, on people’s social media feeds and, for the Republicans, various right-wing news outlets and voice machines; that is where the race is taking place this year. And Iowa’s been, you know, more of a sideshow than the main event. I think Iowa is still important. Just not nearly as important as it used to be.”
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Rynard has witnessed what he describes as a slow-bleed of the certainties and qualities of life for too many Iowans in what he classifies as “the degradation of blue-collar communities”, with diminishing salaries and fewer secure jobs and healthcare a more elusive proposition.
“Farmers did not do particularly well under Donald Trump, as much as he likes to talk about them. It is not about policies or issues or even realities. A lot of Iowans are very frustrated with the world. And the way things are. And they see Trump as someone who is also angry and wants to tear down the system. He doesn’t want to tear down the system for their benefit. But you know, they hear that stuff. And then they listen to other politicians who have been around a while. And it sounds as though those folks just want to keep the system as it is.”
This is not a new story; it’s to be found in the lyrics Bruce Springsteen wrote all of 40 years ago. But the disenchantment has become magnified in recent years. The essential problem for the Democratic Party – a belief, running through the heart of the American interior that they have become a political faith wedded to the interests of the elite – has never been more pronounced and is not without foundation.
Trump has somehow morphed into a crusader against that idea. When you watch Nikki Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis on the podium, it isn’t hard to understand why they are running for the highest office. If they were asked why, they probably wouldn’t understand the question. It’s just in their DNA.
Donald Trump, though, spent all those decades tending to his acquisitions and appetites, with no strong political affiliation or interest. It is impossible to watch him in his current guise – at once former president and returning cult figure – without wondering at the accidental nature of his rise and recalling the evening, in 2011, when he sat, uncomfortable and humiliated at the White House Correspondents dinner listening to Barack Obama tease him about his credentials as a boss on Celebrity Apprentice – “Ultimately you didn’t blame Little John or Meatloaf; you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Say what you like about Mr Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House.”
The roast was mocking and funny. Trump advisers would say that even as he sat there, stung, he resolved there and then to some day run for president, even as the notion was, literally, laughable.
Now Trump stands on the verge of a messianic return, the man who, in that short film is part-frontiersman, part-visionary, a man who will “farm the lands, secure our borders, fight the system all day and finish a hard week’s work by attending church on Sunday”.
In what was the final candidate’s speech of the caucus night in Iowa, Nikki Haley sought to sell the idea of Trump and Joe Biden as a double act, a Statler and Waldorf of the political age.
[ Victorious Donald Trump leaves Iowa snows behind for court appearanceOpens in new window ]
“I can safely say tonight, I will make this Republican primary a two-person race. Trump and Biden are both about 80 years old. Trump and Biden both put our country trillions of dollars deeper in debt and our kids will never forgive them for it. Trump and Biden both lack a vision for our country’s future because both are consumed by the past – by investigations, by vendettas, by grievances.”
Then she was gone with her entourage, exiting Iowa on a late-night flight over the sleeping Midwest, all those months of yakking in the farm towns and prairies behind her now. The battle for the Republican nomination will intensify across New Hampshire this weekend, where the crowd is different: less evangelical, more urban. It is Haley’s last best shot; the place where she believes she can actually eclipse Trump when the votes are counted on Tuesday night.
“Well, that’s nice,” shrugs Pat Rynard. “But she is probably going to get blown out in all the states after that. The enthusiasm and energy and press interest are down because this primary doesn’t say much about the broader Republican primary that we didn’t already know. At least in previous cycles ... like,.Bernie Sanders didn’t win. But his run here really impacted the dynamics of the Democrats and the progressive movement later on.
“What long-term impact will Haley and DeSantis have on the Republicans? I don’t think much.”
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