How Donald Trump Broke the Iowa Caucuses
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
This time last year, Republicans were reeling from a poorer-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm elections; many questioned, again, whether it was time to move on from their two-time Presidential standard-bearer. But Donald Trump is so far ahead in the polls that it would be shocking if he did not clinch the Iowa caucuses. The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels have seen on the ground how much staying power the former President has despite some opposition from religious leaders and establishment power brokers. For MAGA voters, “The core of it is, ‘If Donald Trump is President, I can do anything I want to do,’ ” Samuels tells David Remnick. “ ‘I won’t have anyone . . . telling me I’m wrong all the time.’ ” Since 2016, Trump has honed and capitalized on a message of revenge for voters who feel a sense of aggrievement. Among evangelical voters, Wallace-Wells notes, Trump seems like a bulwark against what they fear is the waning of their influence. “To them, [Biden] is the head of something aggressive and dangerous,” he says. Susan B. Glasser, who writes a weekly column on Washington politics, takes the long view, raising concerns that we’re all a little too apathetic about the threats Trump’s reëlection would pose. “What if 2024 is actually the best year of the next coming years? What if things get much much worse?” she says. “Now is the time to think in a very concrete and specific way about how a Trump victory would have a specific effect not just on policy but on individual lives.”
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| 1:12.6 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:20.8 | I'm David Remnick with a raspy voice thanks to a cold. |
| 1:25.3 | And lo and behold, here we are. It's 2024, election season. And the Iowa |
| 1:31.3 | caucuses are on Monday, the first stop on the long journey to November 5th. There's been a lot of news |
| 1:37.2 | about the two candidates who seem to be competing for second place in the Republican Party, |
| 1:41.7 | Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Rhonda Santos of Florida, |
| 1:45.3 | who visited all 99 counties in Iowa. |
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