If you’ve been keeping up with reports on the upcoming Iowa caucus, you might have noticed some particularly tortured prose as of late. Bizarre mixed metaphors, reaching action verbs galore, etc. “It’s the final sprint, the runners are thrashing each other, and there’s a clock counting down—it sounds a little like a sequence in a movie from the 1970s meant to convey the experience of using drugs, especially when you consider the absolutely mind-blowing concept of a race that ends at a starting line,” Ben Mathis-Lilley writes. He reflects on how the strange dynamics of the 2024 GOP presidential primary are kind of making the political press lose their minds.

Plus, in case you missed it: Mathis-Lilley wrote about Nikki Haley’s recent surge and what it means.

And reporting from a rally in Iowa, Ben Jacobs takes stock of the current state of Trump supporters.

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