Legacy media has called Donald Trump’s win in the Iowa Caucus a “landslide victory” and a “historic win.” Theoretically both statements are true: Trump did beat his two closest opponents, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump’s own former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley by nearly 30 points. And the win was historic in the sense that no other failed president has chosen to run again after being voted out of office.
It’s also historic in that Trump is currently under indictment in several criminal and civil court cases. His fraud trial just ended in New York last week. His latest defamation trial with E. Jean Carroll, the Emmy-winning writer Trump was found liable of raping, began Jan. 16.
While Trump challengers DeSantis and Haley moved on to further campaigning, Trump was sitting in a New York courtroom listening to his attorney, Alina Habba, say that Trump’s rape victim was seeking attention as a defense against her client’s repeated defamation of Carroll.
“She likes her new brand,” Habba said of Carroll.
Yet there are also numbers beyond the percentage between Trump’s 51% of the vote and DeSantis’s 21.2% and Haley’s 19.1%. (Vivek Ramaswamy came in at 7.7% and Asa Hutchinson at 0.2%.) There are 719,000 registered Republicans in Iowa. Barely 100,000 voted in the caucus. Trump’s 51% looks a lot more impressive than his paltry 56,260 votes out of 719,000.
Legacy media — disturbingly excited at the prospect of a Trump candidacy — should actually be asking why Trump only got 51% of the vote when he has already been president and has 100% name recognition. Shouldn’t he have come in at 75% or 80%? These headlines — “Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment” and “Trump’s landslide Iowa win is a stunning show of strength after leaving Washington in disgrace” and “Trump’s resounding Iowa win shows his 2020 election lie is working” — from the New York Times, CNN and the Guardian, respectively, all suggest legacy media is tepid on that Washington Post motto that “democracy dies in darkness.” It seems democracy is dying right out in plain sight and broad daylight. The headlines should have read: “Iowa Republicans Choose Indicted Rapist Over Non-Criminal Challengers.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire entrepreneur who ran the most toxic campaign after Trump’s own, suspended his campaign after the Iowa votes came in and endorsed Trump, urging DeSantis and Haley to do the same.
Ramaswamy, who is as virulently anti-LGBTQ+ as Trump and DeSantis, tweeted an hour before the Iowa caucus began: “There are two genders. And no, a man cannot become a woman. Iowa, I’m asking for your vote tonight” with an American flag emoji at the end.
This is where the GOP is headed — into full culture wars territory. Which is why the question of whether Trump can coalesce non-MAGA voters in a general election should be fundamental to the post-caucus deconstruction of the foregone conclusion that Trump will be the GOP nominee. There is also a possibility of a contested convention, which could very well happen if the current challengers see Trump’s legal woes subsuming the Republican party itself. If Trump only got 51% in Iowa, what does that say about his chances in the general election, particularly as his massive legal woes take center stage in the coming weeks?
Trump’s base in Iowa was both fiercely loyal to the twice-impeached former president and deeply steeped in his rhetoric of lies about the 2020 election and the crimes he’s been charged with. An Iowa entrance poll conducted by NBC News asked “Did Biden legitimately win 2020?” The answer was a disturbing 31% yes and 65% no. In addition, 65% said Trump would still be fit to be president if he were convicted of a crime. Only 31% said he would be unfit if convicted.
Politically, 46% of voters said they considered themselves part of the MAGA movement, a reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan; 50% said they were not part of that movement. In his rallying the night before the caucus, Trump’s closing pitch to Iowa Republicans was to stoke more division: Trump told Iowans their votes can help him punish his enemies.
Pennsylvania will be a key swing state in the 2024 election. It gave Trump a win in 2016 when disaffected Democrats voted third party and ceded the state to Trump by a mere 40,000 votes.
But in 2020, it was Pennsylvania that secured a Joe Biden win when Philadelphia’s votes were finally tabulated on an unseasonably warm Nov. 7, 2020 which catapulted Philadelphians into the streets to celebrate on Broad Street, Market Street and beyond.
But 2024 is different. Several years of Trump’s lies about the election being stolen from him have taken root in a large phalanx of the electorate. And a confluence of domestic and foreign policy issues have already coalesced to create a worrying political landscape for Democrats and a Biden re-election. The administration has staked a lot on confusing messaging from President Biden, pivoting between the disastrous “Bidenomics” rhetoric and now the “democracy is at stake” message.
The fact is, Biden has done a lot for the economy, and democracy is indeed at stake. Almost two-thirds of Canadians say U.S. democracy can’t survive another Trump term — but do Americans agree? Are these messages getting through to voters — particularly those pivotal suburban Philadelphians and newly minted Gen Z voters unexcited by a Biden presidency and deeply concerned over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Also at issue is the fear factor. One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77% said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Trump and his allies since 2020.
Election workers are being bombarded with death threats, the U.S. government says. And Politico reports “America’s frontline election workers are scared to death and are bracing for another torrent of conspiracy theories and attacks from election deniers.”
On Tuesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan explained to prospective jurors in the Carroll case that “for the purposes of this trial, it has been determined already that Mr. Trump did sexually assault Ms. Carroll, that he knew when he made the statements about Ms. Carroll that [they] were false, that he made them with reckless disregard.”
Kaplan had previously clarified for the court that, “Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll.”
Iowa voters didn’t care. The same voters who call LGBTQ+ people groomers and pedophiles — to which Trump alluded in his victory speech Monday night — chose a rapist as their nominee and also believe Biden is not the elected president.
This is how the primary season is beginning — with a convicted rapist who tried to overturn the 2020 election as the GOP’s top contender for president in 2024. What could possibly go wrong?