With the Iowa caucuses, the wind of inevitability blowing over the Republican nomination process has become even colder.
A bastion of white evangelicalism, a small rural state in the Midwest, Iowa is not representative of American diversity, far from it. On the other hand, it is entirely true of the state of mind of the majority of Republicans. This is evidenced by the results of the caucuses held Monday evening, which are overall a copy and paste of national polls, which give Donald Trump a delirious lead in the race for the Republican nomination.
Either way, let’s keep hope and be careful not to overinterpret these results since the polar cold reduced participation to a trickle. These caucuses are, after all, just the very first step in the long primary season. The fact remains that Trump, with 51% of the vote, won in 98 of the state’s 99 counties, including in urban areas, although by narrower margins than in rural areas.
Ron DeSantis, ultraconservative governor of Florida, had bet everything on Iowa to revive his sluggish campaign. He recorded a distant second place (21%), followed by Nikki Haley (19%), despite the support of the governor of Iowa and the director of Family Leader, the largest Christian organization in the state. He will appear with lead in his wing next Tuesday in the primary of New Hampshire, an otherwise politically diverse state, where aggregate polls give him barely 5% of the vote.
Following Iowa, there are only two left to confusedly divide the “no Trump” vote.
Penniless and unpopular, an odorless and colorless version of the master, DeSantis will undoubtedly soon drop out in turn. The earliest would be best. According to this scenario, it emerges that Nikki Haley will fall to the Herculean task of uniting the opposition – which for the moment remains infinitely too weak-willed and dispersed to really be one. The dynamic is staggering in the sense that Mme Haley, a staunch conservative, appears as a centrist in the extremist environment that the American Republican Party has become. She should do well next Tuesday in New Hampshire, which the polls promise her. It is therefore imperative that this gives momentum to his candidacy. However, the possibility is real that this upsurge will ultimately be nothing more than an epiphenomenon, as Donald Trump’s electoral machine and his ideology have taken possession of the Republican Party.
What is this appropriation based on? On an alliance of the cross and the sword, a new Inquisition dressed as a defender of the people and freedom, where speeches against immigration resonate incredibly loudly, even in countries as little “threatened” by it as the Iowa. And in a context where, since electoral choices always depend on questions of bread and butter, Trump is also perceived as a guru of sound economic management, contrary to any serious examination.
The cross is the unwavering evangelical vote of the white right, on which Republicans have relied since Ronald Reagan. Although the nature of this vote has changed and expanded: evangelicals have become less practicing, their support today is more about cultural and identity issues. That Trump, a man without faith or law, became their prophet is less mysterious than it seems. Evangelical voters feel persecuted by liberals just as Trump says he is persecuted by the courts. Fundamentalism by definition inducing full and complete support, beyond doubt, they are ready to forgive him everything since he orchestrated the cancellation of the right to abortion by the Supreme Court. They embrace the simplistic clarity of his authoritarian populism and, in defending their sacrosanct values, they are perfectly comfortable with his transactional approach.
The sword is the far-right movement — xenophobic, ultranationalist, misogynist, anti-state — that Trump invited on January 6, 2021 to forcibly prevent the certification of the results of the November 2020 presidential election. Yesterday ostracized, this movement is now integrated into the party. The fanaticism of Timothy McVeigh, author of the Oklahoma City attack of April 1995 (168 dead), is today constitutive of the Republican logic of power.
Inevitable, the candidacy of Mr. Trump? Mme Haley certainly won’t find the emergency exit alone. Whatever the scenario, Americans will continue to experience tiring political, constitutional and judicial crises. If Trump is a candidate for the presidential election on November 5 and he loses, which will only happen if a broad common front of Democrats, independents and more moderate Republicans forms against him, and he will inevitably cry foul , with violence as a result. If he wins and the situation would be even more dire.