Iowa.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
As he shuffled into the Hotel Fort Des Moines Saturday night, Donald Trump looked not quite ready to embark on the first of many epic battles to reclaim his throne. One leg seemed to be dragging, he was missing his necktie and his shirt was open. Before the door slid shut behind him, an arctic gust lifted his hair. Grimacing, he reached up to pat it down around the sides of his head. He looked shivery, a bit bedraggled.
“That’s a lot of cold weather,” he said to a small crowd that had gathered by the front desk to witness this. There was one camera-man, four Washington Post reporters, a confused-looking hotel guest with two young children, a PR woman holding a martini, and the rightwing attention-monger Laura Loomer. “We’ve got a lot of meetings tonight, we’re doing well,” said Trump, “but it’s nasty out there.”
Many of us had barely left the Fort Des Moines in the past 24 hours, as a blizzard had pounded the grand old hotel, which was built in 1919. It was like the MAGA Shining: We were trapped there. The few reporters who’d managed to get the last flights out of Washington and New York sat by the fake fireplace Friday afternoon, losing their collective minds. Too early for bourbon. Too cold to smoke. And there was nowhere to go. It was far below freezing, and the state Department of Transportation issued warnings about “treacherous” highway roads. Meanwhile, apparitions from the recent political past — Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr., Jason Miller — wandered the hotel’s halls in high spirits. Trump’s victory here feels like a frostbitten fait accompli.
In 2016, he lost Iowa by just 6,000 votes and one delegate (and promptly cried fraud). But that was when he was relying on a ragtag operation of political neophytes. “This time around, it’s different,” said Chris LaCivita, one of his top advisors now. “We have a team of professionals who’ve been doing this a while.” He was the strategist behind the Swift Boat ads that sunk John Kerry. Together with Republican operative Susie Wiles, a Florida powerbroker who turned against Ron DeSantis, they are ready to vanquish all Republican pretenders and prepare for the main event. “We’re enjoying it, we’re having fun, and you know, the boss makes it fun,” said La Civita.
As the blizzard outside grew meaner, Kari Lake materialized in a full face of make-up and a canary yellow sweater. She moved about the lobby inside her own portable media bubble: Two aides aimed lights and mics at her while her husband trailed with a video camera on a gimbal, filming her every move. Why say anything if it’s off-camera? But there wasn’t really anyone to talk to. So the bubble moved across the Great Room toward a couple of bored reporters, who asked her for some inside dope. “I don’t really have any gossip,” she said. She stuck to her ludicrous line about the 2020 election being stolen and waved away questions about whether she’d like to be Trump’s VP, though one suspects she’s just thrilled — maybe even was hoping — to be asked such a thing.
She did offer up a theory for why Trump was set to trounce. You see, she grew up here in rural Iowa, and to her it’s no great mystery as to why her people aren’t taking to DeSantis or Haley. “Nikki Haley represents a different side of the Republican party that I believe the American people have grown weary of,” said Lake. “The warmonger side of the party is not of interest to the voters anymore, we don’t want to start endless war, we liked that President Trump didn’t start any wars. And I think we learned a lot about Ron DeSantis. He’s not the retail politician that you need to be to connect with voters, and I don’t know that you can learn that.”
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