Donald Trump does exactly what he was expected to do
IOWA IS SUPPOSED to surprise. Ted Cruz won there in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012, Mike Huckabee in 2008. There was no upset this year: Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses by 30 points, in line with his polling lead before Iowans gathered in a blizzard to do their thing. Mr Trump won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties. The only other candidate to win one was Nikki Haley, Mr Trump’s former ambassador to the UN. She came first in Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa and therefore a good place to gauge the mood of college-educated Republicans, by a margin of 0.03%. With a few votes yet to be counted, that mini-triumph could yet be reversed.
Mr Trump was magnanimous in victory, congratulating his opponents—one of whom, Vivek Ramaswamy, dropped out and endorsed him. Mr Ramaswamy has called Mr Trump “the best president of the 21st century”, so it was never really clear why he was running against his idol. Mr Trump only releases the crazy when he loses. In 2016, to steal attention from Mr Cruz after his win, he came up with a bizarre riff about the senator’s father being involved in JFK’s assassination. “You need controversy for traction sometimes,” Mr Trump mused before the caucuses this year. Even when he wins, though, Mr Trump still likes to assert his dominance by making things up and watching his fans accept them as truth: he claimed to have won the Iowa caucuses for the third time in a row.
One early conclusion from the Republican primary is that there is not much appetite among Republicans for Trump fans like Mr Ramaswamy when the real thing is on offer. Ron DeSantis, whose political rise can be dated to a video in which his infant daughter appeared in a Make America Great Again onesie, came a very distant second, failing to win a single county despite visiting all of them. But nor is there appetite for a candidate who is straightforwardly opposed to Mr Trump: Chris Christie, who had described the…
2024-01-16 06:02:27
Article from www.economist.com
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