The US president is a once-in-a-lifetime master manipulator of the unseen energies that sway the electorate
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh in November before the US presidential election that he went on to win. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Timesdid. When he flew into Des Moines for a Fox News televised “town hall” event on Wednesday, January 10th, the upper Midwest had been under a blizzard of snow and wind since Monday afternoon. Iowa has the apparatus to cope with weather events but still, the television announcers were excited by the dramatic unfolding.
This was at a stage when everyone, including the participants, were trying to figure out what the American election was about. The abortion issue and thewould become an intense ideological divide. The border issue and the influx of undocumented immigrants under the Biden administration looked set to become another dominant issue. In spring, intense protests over the US military sponsorship of the slaughter in Gaza would sweep through America’s rarefied college campuses.
“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what theis all about. The choice is clear. Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power. Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background that occupy this country.
Trump was in dark, brooding form on his winter campaign in the Midwest. The year ahead, defined by the physical, financial and psychological burden of those trials, was weighing on him. But he crushed all pretense of a plausible Republican alternative by winning 98 out of the 99 counties in Iowa. Haley would hang around for another stubborn seven weeks, enduring Trump’s mocking taunt of “Birdbrain” and angering him by claiming that he was “chaos”.
People outside Trump Tower on New York's Fifth Avenue the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in Manhattan Criminal Court in the 'hush money' trial. Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images And then a new election began. Biden’s decision to drop out, on Sunday July 21st, after an intense period of reflection over a gloomy weekend in Rehoboth, had an instant, transformative effect. The Republican chorus cried foul.shook off three years of incessantly negative media coverage to marshal a breathtakingly swift and organised campaign culminating in a starry August convention in Chicago that outshone the Republican week for pure euphoria. “Joy” became the adopted theme word.
Soon, he would have Sly Stallone, the doe-eyed A-lister boasting a set of biceps that America first met during the Ford administration, in his corner. He even picked up a stray Kennedy, bringing Robert F Kennedy jnr into the fold after the 70-year-old ended his campaign as an Independent. This was an acquisition that delighted Trump and, sometimes when they were together on stage, you could catch Trump staring at Bobby’s ageing kid, almost smitten.
I was there to listen to the couple explain why they had turned full circle from ardent Democratic voters to Trump-voting Republicans. “When Hillary Clinton announced she was running, I couldn’t believe they put her up. It was Bush-Clinton, these constant same people. We watched CNN all the time then. And we went to a Bernie Sanders rally in St Paul. And we really liked a lot of what he said. But CNN had Trump on every night. And it was only CNN. And they were clearly mocking him at the same time. And I thought at times: wait, he makes a good point here.
“You know, Ngoc’s mom grew up in Hanoi and they fled the communists after World War two and then left Saigon. She said about this election: this is my third time and it feels very similar to the first two. I think of us as turning more like Europe – into a Democratic social movement. We don’t mind paying taxes – at all. But it seems like everything has been taken to the extreme. And that is the problem.
Long before midnight on November 5th, it was clear that Trump would return for a second term in the White House. Even his harshest critics acknowledged that Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime master manipulator of the unseen energies that sway the electorate. The victory places Trump among those rare political figures to have loomed over the American political landscape and society for a dozen-plus years.
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