The Political Party That Died in Iowa

I normally only write one blog post a week, usually on Sunday, but recent events in what promises to be a tumultuous election year have compelled me to write an extra blog post this week.

As most people who follow my writings know, I do not put my loyalty nor my hopes on any one political party, preferring instead to focus on who would make the best leader in the world in which we currently reside.

All bets were off once the Iowa caucus took place on Monday. It was, apparently, a place where the final remnants of the party of Lincoln took its final gasp.

They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.

For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.

“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.

“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.”

“‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”

And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:

“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.”

Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”

The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.

His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.”

Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”

“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.”

Have a nice day!

It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I am sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.

“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”

His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican.

Trump’s opponents deserve partial blame for that, for failing to take him on more directly. But some of their candidacies, in tone and substance, offered real alternatives to Trump’s rage-filled nativism. The ominous truth is that there just was no appetite in the electorate for a non-Trumpian candidate. In Iowa - and probably elsewhere, alas - they are all MAGA Republicans now.

Prior to the event, the only thing on everyone's mind was the weather, but the party should have been used to that by this point, the GOP presidential primary campaign has been frozen for the better part of a year.

Trump led by a mile in the early polls. He led by a mile in the final polls. Iowa’s frigid Republican voters never warmed to any message that is not MAGA.

The candidates who explicitly opposed Trump - Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson - went nowhere. Recognizing the peril of opposing Trump, the other candidates did their best to emphasize their similarities with him.

DeSantis offered all of the Trump thuggery and culture wars with none of the Trump pizazz. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to be Trumpier than Trump. Even Haley, who offered the greatest contrast with Trump, was so mild in her critique of the man that she is broadly seen as auditioning to be his vice president. This is not cowardice on her part but a concession to reality. Consider that, when Des Moines Register asked likely Republican caucus voters last month about Trump’s Nazi-tinged talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country and his political opponents being “vermin,” pluralities said such statements made them more likely to support Trump.

I used to think there was a large enough anti-Trump contingent in the Republican electorate that, if given a clear alternative to the demagogue, they would take it. But in Iowa, the voters had such a chance - and stuck with Trump.

It is fair to ask whether the candidates wasted their time even going to Iowa. Trump skipped the debates and did minimal campaigning there, and the old notion that retail politics in Iowa can propel little-known candidates to glory seemed no longer to apply. It was never a contest.

Despite a year of practice, DeSantis is still painfully awkward attempting to sound human. He makes sure to touch all culture-war buttons. Anthony Fauci. George Soros. Teachers unions. Woke government. Trans kids. Indoctrination camps. The diversity-equity-inclusion cartel. The D.C. ruling class. A sexualized curriculum. He mechanically responds to interlocutors: “Great question. What’s your name?”

And he closes each speech with the same 150 words, recited in a singsong voice, sounding bored by his own canned speech. “What we are called upon to do is to preserve what George Washington called the sacred fire of liberty,” he recites. “This is the fire that burned in Independence Hall in 1776 … It’s a fire that burned at a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when our nation’s first Republican president pledged this nation to a new birth of freedom. It’s a fire that burned on the beaches of Normandy when a merry band of brothers stormed the shores.”

Maybe DeSantis really believes the heroes of D-Day were “merry” under machine-gun fire, but his audiences are not merry. They start filing out well before he finishes his dreary appearances.

DeSantis generally avoids Trump, other than to say vaguely that “Donald Trump is running for his issues,” while “I’m running solely for your issues,” whatever those are.

If they appreciate Trump and think he is being treated unfairly, why would they vote for a cheap imitation?

Haley's challenges to the front-runner are timid. “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time. I agree with a lot of his policies,” she assures every audience. “But, rightly or wrongly, chaos has followed him.”

Chaos follows Trump - through no fault of his own!

“You deserve an America without drama. You deserve an America that’s better than whether you have a couple of 80-year-olds running for president,” was as tough a critique as she offered.

She scolded the Trump administration (of which she was a part) of approving too many technology sales to China, and gently chided him for adding $8 trillion to the debt: “Under President Trump, everybody talks about how good our economy was. It was good, but at what cost?”

Still, Haley, for all her timidity, was at least implicitly offering a serious, viable, alternative to Trump. Hers is a traditional Republican message of balanced budgets, lower taxes, help for small business, a strong national defense. “The first thing I think you do is you send an accountant to the White House,” she told them. Woo-hoo! She made only a passing nod to the culture wars that so delight the MAGA crowd, briefly disapproving of “biological boys playing in girls’ sports.”

But this Republican electorate wants something different.

They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he is prosecuted.

They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”

And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”

Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters have not been given an alternative. They had a choice - and they chose Trump.

And the Republican Party received its death blows.