The bitter cold in Iowa during the days before Monday’s Republican caucuses meant the effective cancellation of the climax of the campaign. “Everything’s frozen in place,” one Trump senior staffer happily told me, just another indication that nothing whatsoever could change the outcome of the Republican presidential race.
That is, as metaphors go, a wholly apt one so far for the 2024 campaign: for nearly a year now Donald Trump has been the all-but inevitable Republican nominee. Nothing has been able to disturb that march. Not Ron DeSantis, an opponent backed by the Republican party’s big money, not a guilty verdict on sex abuse charges, nor two state criminal and two federal criminal indictments, nor efforts in multiple states to throw him off the ballot for the constitutional no-no of inciting insurrection. Not even, for moderating his position on abortion to almost heretical levels in evangelical-ruled Iowa. And not the fact that his two main opponents, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, have largely lived in Iowa for the past six months, while Trump has hardly missed a golf game in Mar-a-Lago.
The only hope in the last cold days was that the unprecedented margin Donald Trump seemed headed for on Monday in the caucus meetings across the state might be somehow less than an unimaginably unprecedented margin—a hope dashed by his grabbing more than 50 per cent of the vote, vastly beyond what any Republican has ever achieved in the state.
The press in Iowa seemed dazed by their utter inability to impact the story in any way
Practically speaking, his main challengers had given up months ago. Neither was campaigning against him. Their race was only against each other and for second place, in the hope that they might… well, it was impossible to guess what they thought they might gain, beyond good standing in an irrelevant parallel world.
The effects of a frozen campaign and Trump’s imperturbable candidacy have been particularly interesting on the media. The press in the modern media age has regarded itself as the last word and ultimate arbiter of presidential campaigns. Here in Iowa, they seemed dazed not just by the cold, but by their utter inability to impact the story in any way.
Politicians are afraid of the media, or ought to be, but the media here in Iowa, sensing the enormity of his victory here, seemed afraid of Trump. At this point in most presidential campaigns, you’d find the media crushing on and trying to suck up to a likely winner. At the “Fort,” Des Moines’ grand old lady hotel that has housed a hundred years of politicians, presidential aspirants, and traveling salesman, the media seemed entirely uncertain how to interact, how to even make eye contact, with the inevitably winning Trump team.
Iowa is a hand-shake state. You need to come here and meet voters individually. Ron DeSantis made a point to visit each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. Trump hardly showed up in the state and yet won ninety-eight of them.
In Iowa, Nikki Haley became a last best hope, part of a desperate jockeying for a formula by which there might yet be something resembling an actual Republican primary race. She was “surging,” the media said. If she won a solid second place, she’d come out of Iowa with “momentum.” Indeed, Chris Christie, Trump’s most vocal Republican challenger had, days ago, dropped out of next week’s New Hampshire primary. Wouldn’t most of his support go to Haley? And if she was surging to a second place “victory” in Iowa, Ron DeSantis would necessarily need to drop out, wouldn’t he, and she could consolidate the anti-Trump vote? This seemed, briefly, like a fevered dream.
Alas, the neck and neck finish of DeSantis and Haley— he with 21 per cent; she was 19 per cent — essentially deprived both of the right to claim any mantle as the designated challenger.
Still….there must be something to stop him, mustn’t there be?
Iowa, the beginning of the presidential primary season, was the end of it too. Trump in his victory speech was, for him, weirdly gracious to his opponents — because he no longer had any.
Still….there must be something to stop him, mustn’t there be?
There were Colorado and Maine which, Hail Mary like, were trying to push him off the ballot, with courts in both states ruling that the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil war effort to keep members of the confederacy — those engaged in insurrection — from high office, precluded Trump, because of his actions on January 6, from being President. The Supreme Court immediately took up the case, and somehow this gave hope, if only to pundits and dreamers, that the Court with its conservative majority would treat this as something other than a kerfuffle to be waved away.
And…might not a criminal conviction on any of the 91 felony charges in the four trials he is set to face doom him? Well, last week he appeared in court for the last day of his business fraud trial in New York (to be distinguished from his four other criminal trials) and received the kind of wall-paper media coverage that only seemed to result in ever-bigger polling numbers for him. Indeed, 63 per cent of caucus-goers said they’d consider Trump fit for office even if he were convicted of a crime.
So only Joe Biden was in his way.
On the anniversary of the January 6 onslaught of Trump cadres on the Capitol, Biden rolled out a barnburner speech (well, barnburner for him), squarely framing Trump as a threat, a mortal one even, to the American political way of life. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, and current Senator from Utah, and arguably the clearest figure of Trump opposition in his party, seemed to have the last word, wondering, with some hopelessness, if this was all Biden had, an argument that had clearly changed the minds of none of Trump supporters.
It really does seem that there is nothing in his way.
But perhaps there is yet Trump in his own way. There is his inattention — his golf game really is paramount. And his tolerance for truly nutty people and their yes man devotion — and dysfunction. And the chaos he enjoys or needs, quite at odds with the management demands of a national political campaign. He is running against himself.
That may be what it comes down to. But at least it’s still a race.
