By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
We are told that there are three tickets out of Iowa, and sure enough, when Vivek Ramaswamy came in fourth in 2024, he could read the writing on the wall, and dropped out, leaving President Trump with over 50 percent, and both Governor DeSantis and Governor Haley a very distant second and third.
For her part, Nikki Haley decided she needed to show she could be decisive – presidential – in some way, despite her embarrassing Iowa showing, so she announced that she wouldn’t participate in the next debate unless President Trump showed up. A one-on-one debate between DeSantis and Haley might have been interesting, but it was not to be; ABC jumped on the excuse and cancelled the debate.
Americans have forgotten what debates are in recent years. The audience wants to know how each candidate would handle the same question; instead, the questioners ask different things of each candidate. The audience wants to keep hammering when a candidate dodges an issue; the questioners usually don’t understand the issues enough to realize their questions were left unanswered. The audience loves to see candidates interrogate each other and bring up the issues that the reporters aren’t interested in asking; the moderators hate that because they so often want the reporters to be the stars, not the candidates or the issues.
The first casualties of Iowa were therefore one debate and a couple of candidates (yes, a couple, but then, who even remembered that Gov. Hutchinson was still in?).
So this leaves us to consider what we learned about President Trump on Tuesday night, and yes indeed, we learned a lot.
President Trump is rather old. A lot of pundits (including yours truly) have wondered how the voters would really respond to his running again at this age, even if they supported him in 2016 and 2020. Maybe they would be tired of him; maybe they believed he really lost last time and should have just accepted it and retired. Maybe the people have decided that his time has passed.
The press, the punditry, the Democratic Party, even a number of Republicans, after, all, have spent the past three years repeating The Big Lie: that Joe Biden beat him honestly, that January 6 was an actual insurrection, that the American public hates Donald Trump and wishes he’d leave the scene for good. This is official, the approved truth, the line that must be included in every news story – not just opinion pieces. Hard news has to refer to reports of vote fraud as having been “disproven;” articles must refer to January 6 as “an assault on democracy itself.”
The Iowa Republican Caucuses of the weekend ending on January 15 constituted the first chance to test that theory, to see if real Americans do in fact accept that official line. For people outside Iowa, in fact, that was probably the biggest question.
And the answer came back loud and clear. The people want Donald Trump back.
In a four-person race, President Trump won a real plurality: 51 percent of the total participants caucusing, leaving just 21 percent for Gov. DeSantis and 19 percent for Amb. Haley, leaving less than 8 percent for Mr. Ramaswamy.
Despite three years of hammering away, the press has failed to convince real Americans that Donald Trump really lost in 2020. The public can add; they know there’s no way on earth the electorate grew by 30 million voters between 2016 and 2020. They can see massive fraud when it’s in front of their noses, no matter how much the nattering nabobs behind the curtain claim otherwise, and no matter how often judges refused to even look at evidence, using technicalities to throw out every lawsuit before evidence could be entered.
Despite three solid years of claiming that January 6 was an insurrection, real Americans know better.
The public heard President Trump call for calm in the crowd and denounce lawlessness; the public has seen the evidence that the DoJ had salted the crowd with rabble-rousing agents to encourage people to leave the Trump rally and go to the capitol.
The public knows that Nancy Pelosi refused President Trump’s offer to provide additional security for the capitol that day.
The public even knows – oh, how hard they tried to keep this from getting out – that the Capitol Police had been directed to open the doors and encourage “protestors” to come into the building, because you could hardly claim an “insurrection” if nobody went in.
Now at least, the public sees through it all.
And despite three years – no, frankly, over eight years now – of trying to make the American people hate and distrust Donald Trump, the establishment has failed most gloriously at that one. We are told that we should hate the guy who’s trying to bring manufacturing back from China, the guy who’s trying to stop the invasion on the border, the guy who made America energy-independent, and brought peace to the middle east, and appointed good judges to the bench and sensible people to the bureaucracy.
But all the while, we have been told to support a blatantly corrupt dementia patient whose milquetoast demeanor encourages rogue nations to start wars abroad, whose regulatory overreach has caused massive inflation and made everything from stoves to automobiles unaffordable, whose toxic ideology has prompted him to populate the highest levels of government with bigots, kleptomaniacs, fascists, and cross-dressing weirdos. The Biden-Harris crowd has made our country a laughingstock on the world stage, but we’re expected to respect them anyway, and hate Donald Trump?
It’s madness.
The numbers in Iowa set the record straight, in a way that regular public opinion polls of five hundred or a thousand just can’t do.
Not only did President Trump win the Iowa vote, he won overwhelmingly, despite having three other solid, respectable choices for the delegates to consider – a conservative governor and military man, a moderate governor and ambassador, and a conservative outsider from the business world. Three good choices, for whatever wing of the party one affiliates with. And still, President Trump won 51 percent.
What’s even more impressive is that he won virtually every county in Iowa – urban, suburban, and rural. (at this writing, he appears to have come in second to Nikki Haley, by a single vote, in Johnson County, which allows Democrats to participate in the Republican caucus). Even so – first place in 98 of 99 counties. That’s a heck of an endorsement.
More than that, it’s a landslide.
What does this tell us?
Speaking for myself, I think it tells us that real Americans are furious at the corrupt lies they’ve been fed all these years.
They’re furious at the Democrats for switching us from cheap energy sources that work to expensive energy sources that don’t.
They’re furious at the press for spreading the fake Russia collusion story and the global warming hoax.
They’re furious at the bureaucrats for raising the cost of doing business and devaluing the currency to such a degree that nothing is affordable anymore.
They’re furious at the deviants for encouraging the genital mutilation of our children, and at the Democrats for daring to browbeat us into accepting such mutilation as normal.
And they see President Trump as being deserving of the chance that was illegally denied him three years ago. They remember that until the China virus hit, President Trump had restored our economy, restored peace abroad and brought cultural calm here, that he had controlled the border and brought patriotism back into vogue. They know that he’s not perfect, but that his heart is in the right place, and he will adopt the policies that America needs – exactly the opposite of the destructive policies of today’s Democrats.
Now, this is just one state. Iowa doesn’t exactly speak for all fifty; that’s why we have a long primary season and a nationwide general election. But even so – virtual unanimity like this says a lot. The big cities chose Trump, the small towns chose Trump, the farms and ranches chose Trump.
It’s dangerous to try to read too much into a single election, but the message – at least from Iowa – came through loud and clear: real Americans are going to demand a do-over, and the sooner the crooks and liars stop their antics, the better it will be for them.
America simply can’t go on much longer like this. We need a return to the sanity of a government that knows its place, and leaves Americans alone.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his 2021 political satirical discourses about current events, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” Volumes One, Two, and Three, are available in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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