Trump's trip to Iowa

Focusing on his past, not our future

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

For months, Iowa Republicans have been hammering Democrats over inflation.

Inflation. Inflation. Inflation.

It’s what’s on voters’ minds, they say.

They’re right. But next week, Iowa Republicans will remind the people of something else: Their party is still led by Donald Trump, a guy who cares more about the 2020 election than anything else on this planet, including inflation.

The former president is holding a rally in Sioux City just days before the Nov. 8 election to boost the campaigns of U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley and Gov. Kim Reynolds.

If he does the usual, Trump will obsess about the 2020 election, falsely claim he was robbed – and generally remind Iowans that the leader of the GOP isn't focused on their problems but his own.

Why in the world would Chuck Grassley welcome Trump here less than a week before the election? And in a race that appears to be close?

Yes, I know: The rally is in Republican-heavy northwest Iowa, where Trump is still popular. And goosing GOP turnout could help Grassley in a contest that Iowa’s most reliable poll said this month was within 3 points.

But what happens in Sioux City doesn’t stay in Sioux City. The rest of the state is watching, too. And what Trump’s appearance says to people all across Iowa is this: Republicans, just like the Democrats, are still being led by politicians that most Americans wish would just go away.

The cry for new leadership in this country, in both parties, is deafening.

This summer, we saw polls that said a majority of Democrats didn’t want Biden to run for a second term. The president’s standing has improved somewhat since then, but the message is clear.

Still, Biden says he intends to run again, even as he’s acknowledged it’s not a certainty.

Unfortunately, all this does is freeze the field at a time when potential Democratic candidates could be going to early states to chart a path forward for a party that badly needs a change in its brand.

Most Americans also want Trump to go away, too.

A majority of Republicans say they want Trump to run again in 2024, but they're clearly out of step with the rest of America. A PBS Newshour/NPR/Marist poll last month said only 28% of independents want Trump to run in 2024, while 90% of Democrats said the same thing. Overall, 61% of those polled said they didn’t want Trump to run.

The truth is, most Americans yearn for a change in our political leadership in Washington, D.C. It’s true today, I think, more than it has been at any time over the last nearly four decades that I’ve been watching American politics.

Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Steny Hoyer are well-known, well-worn names in an America that is worn out by politics. (Frankly, some of the emerging GOP leaders, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are more dangerous. But where she should inspire fear for our country, the current leadership just prompts exhaustion.)

This is why you see so many Republican TV ads still tying Pelosi to local candidates; it’s partly why the Democrats got a polling bounce over the summer when Trump was so much in the news over January 6th and the FBI's search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

The formula is the same: Lassoing a local candidate to the symbols of an unpopular political culture is the surest way to bring them down.

This weariness may also explain why the Grassley-Franken race is closer than expected, even as Reynolds maintains a big lead over her Democratic opponent.

Chuck Grassley has been in Washington, D.C., for nearly 50 years; he’s been in elective office for more than 60 years.

People instinctively believe change can be good. Still, Grassley is asking for another six years. And next week, he will welcome Donald Trump to the state, a guy that a majority of Iowans disapprove of, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, a guy who still is wholly obsessed with getting even for the 2020 election, not improving our future.

People in both parties want a politics that works for them; a politics that looks ahead and offers fresh, new leadership.

Iowans clearly want to move beyond Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the rest of the names that have occupied the national political headlines for years.

You talk about weariness over the pandemic, our exhaustion with this country’s politics may rise even above that.

But most Washington politicians don’t get that message. Chuck Grassley and Kim Reynolds don't get it. If they did, they wouldn’t be welcoming Donald Trump to Iowa next week.