Top Democrats did not react to Donald Trump’s crushing win in the Iowa caucuses on Monday with the dismay that might have been expected. Instead, the victory of the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president was heralded as an early beginning to the battle for the White House itself.
Called early, Trump’s victory came by 30 points over the hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who edged the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for second. Only one of 99 Iowa counties did not go for Trump: Johnson county, which includes the University of Iowa, was won by Haley, the relative moderate left in the race – by a single vote.
Responding to Trump’s win, and using an acronym for Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again”, Biden told followers: “Here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me versus extreme Maga Republicans. It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Doing so will allow them to campaign more on the threat Trump poses to American democracy than the virtues of Biden himself, a historically unpopular president facing doubts about his age (81 now, 86 at the end of a second term), his handling of the economy and his support for Israel in its war with Hamas.
Seventeen concern election subversion, 40 were brought over the retention of classified information, and 34 arise from hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.
Trump also faces civil suits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and attempts to keep him off the ballot in Colorado and Maine, under the 14th amendment to the US constitution and for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
Before voting began in Iowa, Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, marked the Martin Luther King Day holiday by attacking Trump over his threat to democracy.
She followed up by emphasising Trump’s central role in the overturning last year of Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that once guaranteed the federal right to abortion.
From the Senate, Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, lambasted DeSantis and Haley for running campaigns in which they long fought shy of attacking Trump.
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