URBANDALE, Iowa — Snowflakes had settled onto Ron DeSantis’s coifed hair and dusted the shoulders of his navy soft-shell jacket. He shivered as the color drained from his cheeks and concentrated at the tip of his nose. Flakes fell steadily behind him at the entrance to his presidential campaign’s volunteer office west of Des Moines.
Roughly 40 reporters had fishtailed through the snow for this impromptu news conference, and still, his press secretary wondered, was it possible for these optics to look a little bit … colder?
“Get him to face this way!” she shouted to an aide beside the Florida governor. She gestured toward some woods in the distance, tree branches sagging under the weight of snowfall.
This suggestion prompted groans from reporters, who had already assembled themselves in a tight knot facing the office, many of them planted knee-deep into a snowbank. Only the photographer from Agence France-Presse had the foresight to wear snow pants.
The news conference, added after DeSantis canceled his schedule, had been called Friday afternoon in the vacuum of an ongoing blizzard, a moment when nearly all the other candidates had scrapped events. (The only candidate to not postpone plans was Vivek Ramaswamy, who reached into far-flung corners of the state: “If you can’t handle the snow, you can’t handle Xi Jinping,” he taunted on social media.) Here was a chance for DeSantis, ever hopeful for second place in the state’s Republican presidential caucuses on Monday, to strike a contrast with the snowflake snowflakes who had opted for virtual events. (“Do you see anyone else adding events today?” an aide said smugly.)
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And how did DeSantis make the most of his unbroken press attention? He blamed the state of conservative media for Donald Trump’s commanding lead.
“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media: Fox News, websites, all this stuff,” DeSantis said. “They just don’t feel accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers, and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. And that’s just the reality.”
Iowa’s 2024 Republican caucuses once held the promise of being a sober, judicious search, in the eyes of many Republicans, to identify a replacement for Trump, a candidate who lost the 2020 presidential election and enters this race with heavy legal baggage. It was a big state with a small population that invites — nay, expects — candidates to have beers in their basements and play carnival games with them at the state fair. Instead, the season has been a slog toward Trump’s inevitable victory, made only slightly more interesting with the plot twist of a blizzard and temperatures cold enough to burn flesh on contact. The Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll released Saturday found Trump with a comfortable 48 percent of voters’ support.
More than a dozen Republican hopefuls had entered the race. They made hundreds of campaign stops, knocked on thousands of doors and spent millions of dollars on advertisements. But 2024 is now upon us, and any sense of possibility and presidential ambition is frozen in place. This place.
In the final 96 hours leading up to the caucuses, the nearly 105-year-old Hotel Fort Des Moines (current slogan: “A grand time capsule reimagined”) was the hub for marooned campaigns.
Nikki Haley and her staff were stranded there, holding off-the-record meetings with reporters after her three “tele-town halls” (essentially glorified Zoom meetings with the voting public). Kari Lake, the former news anchor turned Trump loyalist running for Senate, was stuck there, too, after her Friday speaking event for Trump had been canceled. She was in the lobby that afternoon, in a pair of new snow boots she’d just acquired from Target, greeting a group of women who wore sparkly Trump beanies. That crew had made their way to the hotel’s basement speakeasy-style spot later that night, trading their beanies for bedazzled American flag belts, gold “Trump” pins and matching red sweaters. Jason Miller and Chris LaCivita, two of Trump’s top campaign advisers, sipped drinks at the bar.
Much of the media, meanwhile, was shut in five blocks away, at a Marriott. Its sprawling lobby bar is typically the nerve center of the caucuses’ chattering class — the sort of place to find, as one did in 2012, then-candidate Newt Gingrich holding court, or, as one did in 2020, Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith lingering to spin reporters until last call. But it was mostly empty Friday, with an atmosphere that was less command post, more overnight camp. Reporters, suddenly facing a day of no scheduled events, used the gym or lounged around the common spaces, making phone calls in their legacy media-branded athleisure wear. With no reason to get behind the wheel, they started drinking as early as deadlines would allow. (Reid Epstein, a Midwest-born reporter for the New York Times, braved the conditions to go for a run, returning to the lobby with frozen eyelashes.)
The storm passed by Saturday morning, replaced by a slapping wind and a snow globe haze across the sky. Interstate 80, the state’s main artery, beckoned ominously, strewn with jackknifed semis and spun-out cars abandoned on the shoulder. Iowans, ever the aggressively friendly hosts, did not want their quadrennial out-of-state visitors taking chances: Is your cellphone charged? Have a full tank of gas. Can you carpool with someone? Bring snacks.
“I’d advise you to stay put,” Art Cullen, the editor of the Storm Lake Times in the state’s northwest quadrant, warned me. “Nikki Haley isn’t worth that much.”
Travel to Haley’s event in Iowa City on Saturday afternoon had, in fact, claimed at least one victim. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) had been rear-ended by a semi-truck on her way to stump for the candidate. (Miller-Meeks was unharmed; the car was less fortunate.) When the former U.N. ambassador took the stage of the small theater, she made no mention of the conditions or her day off the trail — or even of winning in Iowa. The caucuses, to Haley, were amounting to a frigid pit stop on the way to New Hampshire, where polls showed her gaining some ground.
What she offered was a condensed version of her usual speech — a tight 17 minutes — which called for “a new conservative leader” who could “leave the negativity and baggage behind.” What that meant, exactly, was up to the listener, as she cast her criticism of the president with a mirrorball glaze. “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” she said, emphasizing her points by waving her arms in a sort of rotating karate chop.
Was the trip worth it — that much, anyway?
Kerry Jones, who’d driven to Iowa City from nearby Tiffin, wasn’t so sure. “I didn’t commit yet,” Jones said. She’d been hoping to learn more about Haley’s position on health care. It didn’t come up during her brief remarks, and Haley skipped the Q&A.
“I’ve heard Nikki’s speech before — that same speech,” Jones said. “I wanted to hear a little bit more about her plans.”
By Saturday evening, a promised Arctic blast was settling in — just in time for Trump’s arrival at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. The former president shuffled into the marble lobby looking a bit disheveled, tieless under his wool coat with his button-down undone to the breastbone. “We’re doing well. We’ve got a lot of tremendous support,” he told reporters. “But it’s nasty out there.”
Weather had kept Trump from last-minute barnstorms throughout the state, as had his legal entanglements — sort of. Trump volunteered to attend court hearings for two of his ongoing civil and criminal cases Washington and New York last week, seizing the spotlight to spin his appearances into campaign spectacles.
So, on Thursday afternoon, the Trump campaign sent Donald Trump Jr., another Florida Man charged with daring the weather to block the path to glory.
“I understand it’s going to be minus-4,” he said. “But if I can get my Florida butt back up here — I have gotten significantly softer, living in Florida, when it comes to being minus-4.”
Don Jr. took the floor in a restaurant in Urbandale around the same time his father was dressing down the judge in New York’s civil case against him — “a fraud on me,” as Trump put it.
What followed was something like a MAGA-themed stand-up routine for about 60 supporters who came to hear Don Jr. speak. He called Hunter Biden a “baby” for refusing to give private testimony to Congress. He said Haley was “like Hillary Clinton trying to be a conservative.” He got a rise from the crowd when he mocked “Bidenomics” as a failure: “I don’t know, I mean, I was a business guy before we got into this charming world of politics.” He channeled his father’s mannerisms, pronouncing “guy” as if it had two syllables and pursing his lips for dramatic effect.
What was the point of tearing Don Jr. away from the Florida warmth to send him to Iowa, with his father so solidly in first place? Because of the “psy op,” he explained. “They’re trying to get you to have that apathy. They want to say, when you win by even a large margin: ‘See? The walls are closing in. There’s blood in the water.’”
“We’ve got to treat Monday as though we’re 10 points back,” he said.
When he had finished speaking, most of the crowd rushed toward him, asking him to sign their baseball caps, a couple of yarmulkes, a life-size reproduction of the Constitution. The lackluster vibe that had hung over the scene at the other candidates’ events had disappeared here.
“The pie is already baked, already sliced, and it’s sitting on the table, ready to be served,” said Gary Leffler, a resident of West Des Moines.
Had there been a point to this 2024 campaign cycle? Leffler, beaming in a white hat embroidered with “Trump Caucus Captain” in gold, promised there had.
“Every caucus time, they ask if Iowa should remain first in the nation, but I just think the Iowa people are so engaged in the process,” he said. He’d been for Trump in 2016 and 2020, “but when I saw all the candidates coming up, I said, ‘You know, I lean Trump, but I’m going to go listen.’”
He listened. He still prefers Trump.
Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.