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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 rustle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
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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:
Follow this authorDana Milbank's opinionsFollow
“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.”
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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 Three.”
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’m 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.”
Advertisement
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. If the results of Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night are close to the overwhelming triumph for Trump that the polls suggest, they will show 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 there just wasn’t appetite in the electorate for a non-Trumpian candidate. In Iowa — and probably elsewhere, alas — they are all MAGA Republicans now.
People here just won’t stop complaining about the weather.
“On Monday, it’s going to be so cold — like, I don’t even know what negative-15 is,” said Nikki Haley.
Advertisement
“Maybe negative-20,” fretted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump called off all but one of his pre-caucus rallies for “the safety of MAGA patriots across Iowa.”
What a bunch of snowflakes!
Admittedly, it is nippy here — exposed skin can succumb to frostbite in about 10 minutes — but the Republican candidates should have been well used to this by now. 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 leads by a mile in the final polls. Iowa’s frigid Republican voters haven’t warmed to any message that isn’t 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.
Advertisement
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’s broadly seen as auditioning to be his vice president. This isn’t cowardice on her part but a concession to reality. Consider that, when the Des Moines Register poll 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’s fair to ask whether the candidates wasted their time even coming to Iowa. Trump skipped the debates and did minimal campaigning here, 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.
Advertisement
It’s obvious that journalists wasted their time; more than 1,000 came for the caucuses, waiting out the storm at the Hotel Fort Des Moines speakeasy, dining with each other, outnumbering actual Iowans at candidate events and descending paparazzi-style on the few genuine voters present. Leaving a Haley event, I heard one voter rebuff a reporter’s request for an interview: “I’ve already done three, but thank you.”
I arrived in Des Moines Thursday morning and, because Trump held only the one rally, on Sunday, I had three days to spend with the losers, examining their failures to launch.
On Friday morning, during the height of a blizzard, the Iowa state police urged people to “stay home” because of “extremely dangerous” conditions. “Please, don’t put yourself or others in danger.”
An hour later, DeSantis went right ahead with his event in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, Iowa.
Advertisement
Maybe the guy just celebrates recklessness. The evening before, at a DeSantis appearance at a barbecue place in Ames, I watched as a climate-change demonstrator climbed the stage while the candidate was speaking and unfurled a “DeSantis: Climate Criminal” banner.
These demonstrators have routinely disrupted candidate appearances here, and they’re usually led out after a momentary interruption. But at the DeSantis event, one of his security staff ran across the stage, caught the demonstrator with a flying tackle and the two fell from the stage to the floor with a sickening thud. There were gasps and murmurs in the room.
DeSantis joked about the sudden, unprovoked violence. He mocked the kid for “stumbling around to get his flag out.” He then boasted about a similar tackle at one of his events two nights earlier, when the demonstrators “got taken down and done, all this stuff.”
Advertisement
All this stuff. Despite a year of practice, DeSantis is still painfully awkward attempting to sound human. He wants supporters to know that “my, um, my, my wife … is out knocking on people’s doors, doing all this stuff.” The Machine Shed restaurant chain, he adds, is where, “you know, they have the different stuff where you can buy the gizmos or the things.” If elected, he promises, “we’re going to do that stuff.”
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. Asked directly about Trump at an event in Clive, Iowa, DeSantis gingerly replied that “if he’s the nominee, the whole election is going to be about legal issues.” But he quickly added that the prosecutions are “unfair” and assured his listeners that “you can appreciate what Donald Trump did.”
So if they appreciate Trump and think he’s being treated unfairly, why would they vote for a cheap imitation?
Ramaswamy, despite holding more than 360 events in Iowa over the past year, was polling in the single digits on the eve of the caucus. But that didn’t stop him from risking the lives of his few supporters. Ramaswamy’s SUV skidded into a snow ditch last week and required the help of a “good Iowan” to push him out. He maintained his schedule anyway, likening himself to the father of our country: “George Washington didn’t complain about the weather when he crossed the Delaware.”
During the blizzard, I drove with colleagues to see him address supporters at a Comfort Inn in West Des Moines. Except there were hardly any supporters. Instead, the room was filled with college and high school kids visiting for the caucuses — and about 15 climate-change demonstrators, one of whom began heckling moments into the event.
“You lie, dude! You’re a liar!”
Ramaswamy, in a dig at DeSantis, said “we’re not going to have a security guard or a police officer tackle him” — and instead invited demonstrators to sit in the front row and ask questions. This was a miscalculation, and before long the room was festooned with yellow banners announcing “Vivek: Climate Criminal,” while the group chanted: “Vivek is a liar! The planet is on fire!”
One man took the microphone and complained to the protesters that he had come “all the way from Puerto Rico” to hear Ramaswamy.
“I came all the way from California!” retorted one of the demonstrators.
Finally, the campaign cleared out the hecklers, and Ramaswamy, alleging that the activists were part of a “quasi-religious cult,” offered his exotic view that “the earth is more covered by green surface area today than it was a century ago because carbon dioxide is plant food.”
The denial of climate-change is but one plank in Ramaswamy’s zany platform, which holds that Jan. 6, 2021, was an “inside job” and white supremacy is a myth. During the blizzard, he told the crowd of his plans to fire 75 percent of the federal workforce and to abolish the FBI as part of his fight against the imaginary “shadow government in the deep state.” He also wants to revive “our inner animal spirit.”
Adding to the surreal environment, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz rose, praising Ramaswamy’s handling of the demonstrators and asking: “How do we get civility? How do we get decency?” This from the man who, as Newt Gingrich’s wordsmith, was widely credited with persuading Republicans to label Democrats “traitors,” “sick” and “corrupt.”
Ramaswamy’s solution for restoring civility included a suggestion that if “somebody hits you, you hit him back 10 times harder.”
His strategy for the Iowa caucuses was just as confounding: He would hug Trump as tightly as possible. Ramaswamy hailed Trump as “the business guy who can execute and break things,” and gushed that there’s “a lot of what Donald Trump did that I love and respect.” His only complaint was that Trump didn’t go far enough to sack federal workers and vitiate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
DeSantis offered Trumpian violence. Ramaswamy offered Trumpian conspiracy nonsense. Is there nobody who actually offers an alternative to Trump? Why, yes there is. Unfortunately, he was assaulted over the weekend by a giant carrot.
I walked through downtown Des Moines Saturday night (temperature: -10) to see Hutchinson, the one true Trump critic in the race after Chris Christie’s departure. At a co-working space, the former Arkansas governor was addressing a group of 100 visiting students — hardly a caucus voter among them — when a person in a carrot costume snuck onstage. (Unlike DeSantis, Hutchinson lacked the staff to intercept, much less tackle, the interloping vegetable.) From an animal rights group, the carrot carried a sign that said “Eat me!”
Hutchinson smiled, confused, and tried to stick to his message.
“If you’re saying January 6 was a patriotic act, you’re not telling the truth to Americans,” he said. He called Trump’s bid “a frail candidacy” and “a failed candidacy” that will be exposed in court. “Does it not erode confidence in our judicial system that you’ve got somebody running for president of the United States who goes out there and attacks the judge, attacks the prosecutor, attacks the jury, attacks everybody?”
One of the students noted that Trump’s approach to politics “resonates with a lot of Republicans.”
“If you’re right in your analysis, I lose,” Hutchinson responded.
An hour later, the final Des Moines Register poll showed Hutchinson getting 1 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
Haley, by contrast, edged DeSantis to gain second place in the poll — trailing Trump by a mere 28 points. Her attempts to win the anti-Trump vote without actually saying anything that sounds anti-Trump has been a gymnastic feat, and she continued it in the final days.
I caught up with her campaign at a stop in Ankeny, where she held forth in a wedding venue in an upscale development of lofts, boutiques and yoga. In the parking lot for her event assembled an armada of Audis, Cadillacs and Lexuses, for this was Haley’s base: what remains of the country club, chamber-of-commerce Republicans who dislike Trump.
But her 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.”
Where Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are dark, even apocalyptic, Haley is sunny. She speaks plainly of her party’s need to reverse course. “Republicans have lost the last seven of eight popular votes for president,” she says, asking to “leave the negativity and the baggage behind.”
She points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. 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’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. 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 haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
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INDIANOLA, Iowa — 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 rustle 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 Three.”
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’m 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. If the results of Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night are close to the overwhelming triumph for Trump that the polls suggest, they will show 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 there just wasn’t appetite in the electorate for a non-Trumpian candidate. In Iowa — and probably elsewhere, alas — they are all MAGA Republicans now.
People here just won’t stop complaining about the weather.
“On Monday, it’s going to be so cold — like, I don’t even know what negative-15 is,” said Nikki Haley.
“Maybe negative-20,” fretted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump called off all but one of his pre-caucus rallies for “the safety of MAGA patriots across Iowa.”
What a bunch of snowflakes!
Admittedly, it is nippy here — exposed skin can succumb to frostbite in about 10 minutes — but the Republican candidates should have been well used to this by now. 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 leads by a mile in the final polls. Iowa’s frigid Republican voters haven’t warmed to any message that isn’t 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’s broadly seen as auditioning to be his vice president. This isn’t cowardice on her part but a concession to reality. Consider that, when the Des Moines Register poll 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’s fair to ask whether the candidates wasted their time even coming to Iowa. Trump skipped the debates and did minimal campaigning here, 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.
It’s obvious that journalists wasted their time; more than 1,000 came for the caucuses, waiting out the storm at the Hotel Fort Des Moines speakeasy, dining with each other, outnumbering actual Iowans at candidate events and descending paparazzi-style on the few genuine voters present. Leaving a Haley event, I heard one voter rebuff a reporter’s request for an interview: “I’ve already done three, but thank you.”
I arrived in Des Moines Thursday morning and, because Trump held only the one rally, on Sunday, I had three days to spend with the losers, examining their failures to launch.
On Friday morning, during the height of a blizzard, the Iowa state police urged people to “stay home” because of “extremely dangerous” conditions. “Please, don’t put yourself or others in danger.”
An hour later, DeSantis went right ahead with his event in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, Iowa.
Maybe the guy just celebrates recklessness. The evening before, at a DeSantis appearance at a barbecue place in Ames, I watched as a climate-change demonstrator climbed the stage while the candidate was speaking and unfurled a “DeSantis: Climate Criminal” banner.
These demonstrators have routinely disrupted candidate appearances here, and they’re usually led out after a momentary interruption. But at the DeSantis event, one of his security staff ran across the stage, caught the demonstrator with a flying tackle and the two fell from the stage to the floor with a sickening thud. There were gasps and murmurs in the room.
DeSantis joked about the sudden, unprovoked violence. He mocked the kid for “stumbling around to get his flag out.” He then boasted about a similar tackle at one of his events two nights earlier, when the demonstrators “got taken down and done, all this stuff.”
All this stuff. Despite a year of practice, DeSantis is still painfully awkward attempting to sound human. He wants supporters to know that “my, um, my, my wife … is out knocking on people’s doors, doing all this stuff.” The Machine Shed restaurant chain, he adds, is where, “you know, they have the different stuff where you can buy the gizmos or the things.” If elected, he promises, “we’re going to do that stuff.”
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. Asked directly about Trump at an event in Clive, Iowa, DeSantis gingerly replied that “if he’s the nominee, the whole election is going to be about legal issues.” But he quickly added that the prosecutions are “unfair” and assured his listeners that “you can appreciate what Donald Trump did.”
So if they appreciate Trump and think he’s being treated unfairly, why would they vote for a cheap imitation?
Ramaswamy, despite holding more than 360 events in Iowa over the past year, was polling in the single digits on the eve of the caucus. But that didn’t stop him from risking the lives of his few supporters. Ramaswamy’s SUV skidded into a snow ditch last week and required the help of a “good Iowan” to push him out. He maintained his schedule anyway, likening himself to the father of our country: “George Washington didn’t complain about the weather when he crossed the Delaware.”
During the blizzard, I drove with colleagues to see him address supporters at a Comfort Inn in West Des Moines. Except there were hardly any supporters. Instead, the room was filled with college and high school kids visiting for the caucuses — and about 15 climate-change demonstrators, one of whom began heckling moments into the event.
“You lie, dude! You’re a liar!”
Ramaswamy, in a dig at DeSantis, said “we’re not going to have a security guard or a police officer tackle him” — and instead invited demonstrators to sit in the front row and ask questions. This was a miscalculation, and before long the room was festooned with yellow banners announcing “Vivek: Climate Criminal,” while the group chanted: “Vivek is a liar! The planet is on fire!”
One man took the microphone and complained to the protesters that he had come “all the way from Puerto Rico” to hear Ramaswamy.
“I came all the way from California!” retorted one of the demonstrators.
Finally, the campaign cleared out the hecklers, and Ramaswamy, alleging that the activists were part of a “quasi-religious cult,” offered his exotic view that “the earth is more covered by green surface area today than it was a century ago because carbon dioxide is plant food.”
The denial of climate-change is but one plank in Ramaswamy’s zany platform, which holds that Jan. 6, 2021, was an “inside job” and white supremacy is a myth. During the blizzard, he told the crowd of his plans to fire 75 percent of the federal workforce and to abolish the FBI as part of his fight against the imaginary “shadow government in the deep state.” He also wants to revive “our inner animal spirit.”
Adding to the surreal environment, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz rose, praising Ramaswamy’s handling of the demonstrators and asking: “How do we get civility? How do we get decency?” This from the man who, as Newt Gingrich’s wordsmith, was widely credited with persuading Republicans to label Democrats “traitors,” “sick” and “corrupt.”
Ramaswamy’s solution for restoring civility included a suggestion that if “somebody hits you, you hit him back 10 times harder.”
His strategy for the Iowa caucuses was just as confounding: He would hug Trump as tightly as possible. Ramaswamy hailed Trump as “the business guy who can execute and break things,” and gushed that there’s “a lot of what Donald Trump did that I love and respect.” His only complaint was that Trump didn’t go far enough to sack federal workers and vitiate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
DeSantis offered Trumpian violence. Ramaswamy offered Trumpian conspiracy nonsense. Is there nobody who actually offers an alternative to Trump? Why, yes there is. Unfortunately, he was assaulted over the weekend by a giant carrot.
I walked through downtown Des Moines Saturday night (temperature: -10) to see Hutchinson, the one true Trump critic in the race after Chris Christie’s departure. At a co-working space, the former Arkansas governor was addressing a group of 100 visiting students — hardly a caucus voter among them — when a person in a carrot costume snuck onstage. (Unlike DeSantis, Hutchinson lacked the staff to intercept, much less tackle, the interloping vegetable.) From an animal rights group, the carrot carried a sign that said “Eat me!”
Hutchinson smiled, confused, and tried to stick to his message.
“If you’re saying January 6 was a patriotic act, you’re not telling the truth to Americans,” he said. He called Trump’s bid “a frail candidacy” and “a failed candidacy” that will be exposed in court. “Does it not erode confidence in our judicial system that you’ve got somebody running for president of the United States who goes out there and attacks the judge, attacks the prosecutor, attacks the jury, attacks everybody?”
One of the students noted that Trump’s approach to politics “resonates with a lot of Republicans.”
“If you’re right in your analysis, I lose,” Hutchinson responded.
An hour later, the final Des Moines Register poll showed Hutchinson getting 1 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
Haley, by contrast, edged DeSantis to gain second place in the poll — trailing Trump by a mere 28 points. Her attempts to win the anti-Trump vote without actually saying anything that sounds anti-Trump has been a gymnastic feat, and she continued it in the final days.
I caught up with her campaign at a stop in Ankeny, where she held forth in a wedding venue in an upscale development of lofts, boutiques and yoga. In the parking lot for her event assembled an armada of Audis, Cadillacs and Lexuses, for this was Haley’s base: what remains of the country club, chamber-of-commerce Republicans who dislike Trump.
But her 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.”
Where Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are dark, even apocalyptic, Haley is sunny. She speaks plainly of her party’s need to reverse course. “Republicans have lost the last seven of eight popular votes for president,” she says, asking to “leave the negativity and the baggage behind.”
She points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. 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’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. 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 haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
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