The Iowa caucus represents an appropriately eccentric starting point for the selection of the 2024 US presidential nominees. On both sides of the political divide, caucus members rarely vote for the same people as the rest of the country. The Republicans here are dominated by evangelicals, hence the wins for Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 — and its anachronistic procedure (more on that later) caused havoc in the Democratic contest last time out. Regardless, its default status as stage-setter is invariably influential in the year to come.
Leaving Hotel Fort Des Moines on caucus day, Donald Trump announced to the assembled press that “we’ve won [Iowa] twice, as you know”. That he lost to Ted Cruz in 2016 was such a minor example of his campaign’s complete disjuncture from reality that it barely merited the question as to whether he was actively lying, drawing on a sincerely distorted understanding.
Though results won’t filter through until this afternoon Australian time, Trump is going to win. This is despite having attended no debates and barely campaigning around his crowded schedule of court cases. The religious right has, in Iowa as in so many places around the US, fallen in behind someone whose vulgarity, avarice and serial infidelity (not to mention several accusations of sexual assault) would seem to represent everything in the modern world they oppose.
The melancholy attempts of formerly influential Republicans in the state to turn the tide against him have had essentially no effect. Indeed, if another candidate even runs him close, it will be a major surprise and something of an embarrassment, both for Trump and the pollsters, who consistently give him a lead of double digits over any other contender.
The one wildcard is Iowa’s terrible weather, which combined with Iowa’s distinct caucus procedure (voters have to turn out in person to attend caucus meetings that then decide how they will vote, and have a much shorter time frame to do so) could create the first instances of institutional voter suppression Trump doesn’t like the look of. In this context, Trump has been telling his supporters to “pretend you’re one point down”, and insisting none of his voters stay home despite the “life-threatening cold” promised for caucus night, with a wind chill of 40 degrees below zero across the state.
He told a rally on Sunday “if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it”, which got a laugh. “You’ll be safe and all … You’re going to be all indoors, but you’ve got to get up; you’ve got to vote. Because it has nothing to do with anything but taking our nation back, and that’s the biggest thing there is.”
The question has always been whether anyone can offer a true alternative, and increasingly the answer is Nikki Haley. Her mangling of a question about the causes of the US Civil War (she failed to mention slavery) was widely mocked by her Republican opponents, but having positioned herself as both “the last moderate standing” (as Crikey pointed out this morning, that may be slightly jarring from an Australian point of view, given her social views) and a more expansive foreign policy than Trump, she has worked her way into a likely second-place finish.
Spare a thought then for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. At one time he was the Republican most likely, “Trump with a brain”, representing the progressive nightmare of autocratic hard-right thinking married to intelligence, work ethic and competence. He turned out to be nothing much at all. Thanks to a lack of product differentiation from the OG and his own quite profound lack of charisma, he has drifted so far down the pecking order that a sufficiently brutal result for him in Iowa could see his presidential campaign finished at the first hurdle.
All of this is simply embroidery. Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. At the very least, if he fails to do so it would be a disaster for polling greatly in excess of what happened in the other direction in 2016. Amid the court cases, the accelerating rhetoric, promises of purges and armies turned on US citizens, his lead over Republican alternatives is even greater nationally than it is in Iowa.
Is Trump unstoppable? And what would a second term of The Donald mean for the US? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Listening to some “ordinary” Americans talking about their life and country a couple of days ago I was amazed by how poorly informed they were on quite simple issues.
In the US and here, we’ve seen a long and effective campaign by Big Money to destroy accurate sources of information and replace them with lies and bluster in the Trump style.
The problem is, it works, so that while Biden has done a reasonable job in the US, it’s not the reality that matters, it’s the showmanship.
Here in Aus. we can hardly be complacent. By any reasonable evaluation, our own master of scare and misinformation, Dutton, shouldn’t be in there with the remotest chance of winning the next election, but he is.
Until we can re-gain control of our public information sources from various neoliberal propaganda machines, we’re in big trouble.
Labor could start correcting the problem by remaking the ABC but the fact that even this basic step is too scary for them says a lot about their lack of courage in the face of massive corporate money.
Think as you suggest at the end citing the ABC, we shouldn’t be complacent as we have not had a diverse and informative media for decade or more….
The question is, what can “we” the public do in the face of a near complete takeover of our media by right wing corporates.
Rubbish in = rubbish out and that covers nearly all of our press now. Domain has thoroughly warped The Age and the SMH where housing is concerned for example and while The Guardian, Crikey and The Conversation are good publications, they are small.
Failing the very unlikely intervention of government into a David and Goliath battle with Big News, the only option left is to strengthen the ABC. Labor should be acting strongly here but I suspect they really don’t want an independent voice that will, at times, take them to task over their policies.
So “we” are powerless.
Maybe not, especially as more people desert RW MSM due to old age, while middle aged and younger should be educated enough to support outlets that actually endeavour to inform vs. running RW political agitprop to ‘wedge’ and stymie progress.
The complacency and corruption of our monocultural political, media and corporate elites allowing media cartel to develop and consolidate against their own ‘free market’ principles (not libertarian but authoritarian); when they hit difficulties, they can split or sell off assets at market value.
That’s because the incoming Labor government didn’t take the action it needed to do to make them a 3 term government. If they had, then we wouldn’t be here.
Stock in trade hypocrisy and ignorance from the evangelicals and Republicans.
This bloke really is Dame Edna without the jokes. I think we need to stop pretending this is a political thing and recognise it as a resurgence of primitive, medieval-style faith. When facts are held to be unpleasant, as well as hard to get your head around, faith washes it all away.
As I marvel at the achievement of an insecure fantasist who has done nothing but complain forcefully and incoherently since 1980, just like every boss I’ve ever had, I hear again John Lennon’s 1966 assessment of his then band’s popularity.
Edna is a too genteel, methinks Sir Les Patterson is more on a par with Trump…& equally physically attractive. Albeit Sir Les was likeable & lacked the cruel streak.
“Make America Dumber!”
Indeed.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German theologian accused of a coup against Hitler) would call this America’s moment of stupidity in the same way he saw the rise of Hitler as Germany’s stupid moment (he means ignorance). He saw it as a sociological problem because stupidity is intricately connected to sociability. People who cling to slogans, catchwords, and propaganda lose their sense of independent thought and moral responsibility. He advocated breaking free from oppressive systems and ideologies that restrict our thinking and limit our potential.
Unfortunately, he was hanged.
It’s an amazing space – the lengths some of the mob will go, to defend their personal ideological facts, the ‘research’ from sources (no matter how discredited, holding out against reality) to validate those values : rather than acknowledge they could be wrong. All because ‘the other side couldn’t possibly be right’? To admit they were played, for the lesser good.
But that leaves them no room for apology when eventually they are proved to have been willfully ‘misled’ – studied cultivated ignorance and ‘safety in numbers’ is definitely neither any defence nor absolution of responsibility. Pyrrhic victories is not an aspirational acquired taste.
They weren’t even ‘just following orders’ – they were following their myopic, one-eyed ill-serving blind gut instincts, impervious to curiosity.
Trump and Mike Johnson are on track to destroy the Republic Party and guarantee Biden finishes the job.