by It’s the latest hot TV genre: a woman in a frigid outpost, wrapped in puffy outerwear, trying to uncover truths buried in ice.
In the new season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Jodie Foster is a police officer trudging through the snow trying to solve a murder in a remote Alaskan town described as “the end of the world.” In FX’s “Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin is an amateur detective trudging through the snow trying to solve a murder at a secluded retreat in Iceland.
And now I find myself in padded outerwear, trudging through the snow in frigid Iowa, trying to uncover truths buried in the ice.
I don’t have as much mystery to unravel as the detectives on television. The only thing the horde of journalists here are trying to figure out is whether Donald Trump will win Monday’s caucuses with a plurality or whether he can achieve a majority. No one expects a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama style surprise.
A snowstorm on Friday froze the action. Drivers skidded all over Des Moines and cars were left abandoned on the roads. Candidates canceled events and rushed to hold telephone town halls. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny donned wool earmuffs for live reporting. Journalists planning to arrive this weekend faced canceled flights. As Trump and others ruled out in-person rallies, reporters stood open-mouthed in the lobbies of the Fort Des Moines Hotel and the downtown Marriott.
On Friday night, Trump released a video, telling Iowa accusingly, “I guess you have the worst weather in recorded history.” Maybe he should have arrived earlier instead of haranguing the judge at his fraud trial in New York on Thursday.
The candidates’ replacements resorted to extreme measures. Kari Lake, who supports Trump in a yellow sweater (a hawk-eye color for her alma mater), joked that she would use “the old strategy” of the telephone to reach voters.
Campaign advisers to Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were desperately calculating whether the weather might give them an advantage: Maybe some of Trump’s older voters in rural areas who have to drive a long way to the caucuses wouldn’t show up on Monday, which It could be the coldest day. day in the history of the caucus, with a wind chill that could reach 40 degrees below zero.
But Trump’s team here, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jason Miller, wandered around looking upbeat. “We’re confident, we’re not arrogant,” Miller told me.
Compared to Trump Sr.’s poor running game in 2016, when he came in second to “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, as he called him, the MAGA world is a model of organizing. And that should scare Democrats.
“If you didn’t know any better, you’d think all of our grassroots guys have been media trained,” Miller said. “Some of these people, because they watch everything the president does, they know any question. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the economy, Biden, the witch hunt, Austin.” As in Lloyd. And “the president” Miller refers to is Trump.
With a snow day here, I had time to contemplate the real mystery of Iowa: What has happened to America?
In January 2008, the Democratic caucuses offered an exciting contest. In overwhelmingly white Iowa, Barack Obama showed that Americans could push a black candidate to the Oval Office. Surprisingly, race was not a major factor in the contest.
When I saw Obama at his first event in New Hampshire after his Iowa victory, I was still stunned by the outcome. “Wow,” I said. “You really did it.”
He seemed solemn and a little deadpan, recalling the scene in “The Candidate” when Robert Redford, the young, charismatic politician, surprises his more experienced, status quo opponent and mutters, “What do we do now?”
So it seemed like we were embracing modernity and inclusivity, moving away from John Wayne’s image of America.
How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?
Of course, every time there is a movement, there is a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened and want to turn back time. Trump has tapped into that resentment, trying to drag us back in time, restricting women’s rights, inflaming voters to “take back America” and, as he said on January 6, exhorting his base to “fight like hell” or “you”. “We are no longer going to have a country.”
Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. It amazes me why his devoted fans don’t care about his bad streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, shamelessly mock disabilities in a way that has never been done in politics (President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries after being tortured, the disability of a Times reporter) and make people laugh. loyal Trump supporters. He calls Haley “Birdbrain.” Trump is 77 years old, but he sees himself as a chick. On Thursday he published a video on Truth Social mocking the “White House senior housing” center, featuring photos of Biden, 81, looking helpless and out of place.
Obama’s victory in Iowa was due to having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity.
That this is happening during a snowstorm is appropriate. Trump’s entire life has been a snow job.
