Trump gets ‘best case scenario’ in Iowa as GOP field struggles to keep up

‘The convertibility of voters like that to anything other than the Trump view of the world is impossible,’ MSNBC host says

Donald Trump ended up with what could be described as a “best-case scenario” after he won the Iowa caucuses by a historic margin.

Mr Trump achieved blowout in the first-in-the-nation contest, with the fight for second being won by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Monday night.

Ms Haley had the momentum going into the caucuses, but her progress was stunted by Mr DeSantis, Matt Fuller of The Daily Beast noted before all the votes had been counted. Ms Haley’s performance still did not allow Mr DeSantis to hit the ground running going into the New Hampshire primary on 23 January.

Anti-woke biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also failed to cut into Mr Trump’s support even though he at times became a stand-in for the former president at the initial Republican primary debates that Mr Trump declined to attend.

The former president won every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties, even as Mr DeSantis had made it a major part of his campaign to complete the “full Grassley” – visiting all of them – a practice named for the state’s long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley.

Mr Trump is the overwhelming favourite to win the GOP presidential nomination for a third time in a row despite that he faces 91 criminal counts spread across four indictments. His election denialism, rejecting the results of a legitimate election in 2020, led to his second impeachment by the House after his supporters ransacked the US Capitol as Congress was working to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.

His attempts to overturn the 2020 election prompted legal action in Georgia and Washington, DC, while his handling of classified documents led to an indictment in Florida. Mr Trump was also indicted in New York in relation to the hush money payment to adult actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. The January 6 insurrection is part of an election interference case in Washington, DC.

Mr Trump is also mired in civil cases in New York where the state Attorney General Letitia James is attempting to remove his ability to do business in the state and to impose a hefty fine on the Trump Organization after he and his children were found to have inflated the worth of their assets to attain favourable loans and insurance agreements.

The ex-president is also part of an ongoing second defamation trial from writer E Jean Carroll, who claimed Mr Trump raped her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. Ms Carroll argues Mr Trump repeatedly defamed her when accusing her of lying about the incident. In the first defamation trial, Mr Trump was found liable for sexual assault. He’s set to attend the proceedings in the second trial on Tuesday.

Mr Trump has also been criticised for his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, specifically about immigrants who he has said are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his political opponents “vermin”.

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell noted on Monday night that “the worst thing we’ve learned about the Republican primary electorate is not yet in these entrance poll questions tonight,” adding that CBS’s final poll before the caucuses “shows that 81 per cent of Republican primary voters and caucus participants ... agree with Donald Trump that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country”.

“That means that 81 per cent of the Republican primary electorate believe Nikki Haley has poisoned blood and is poisoning the blood of the United States,” he added. Ms Haley’s parents moved from India to Canada in 1964, before moving to South Carolina five years later.

“That as a roadblock for Nikki Haley is impossible,” Mr O’Donnell said of Trump voters. “But it also shows you what you’re up against in any kind of campaign against voters like that, the convertibility of voters like that to anything other than the Trump view of the world is impossible. There’s no campaign ad, there’s no speech you can make ... Not one of them can be converted.”