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While I’ve been in Iowa, the thing that’s been rattling around in my head is an exchange at the Fox News town hall that aired last week. A woman asked Donald Trump a question about shutdowns, and they talked about that for a while, then she said, “Love you,” and he replied, “Appreciate it.”
Easy, breezy. Campaigns can be a few things at once. This one involves the mind-bending legal territory of the upcoming trials and the illiberalism of what Trump is promising with the campaign of retribution and revenge. A lot of Republicans love Donald Trump, and he appreciates it. There’s no getting around that or puncturing it for other candidates.
The past few days have been like the winter of winters in Iowa: 48 hours of blizzard conditions, subzero temperatures, wind chills that went into the minus 30s.
“I think a lot of people can’t get out. I had to get a ride because the snowplows trapped my car,” one woman at Sunday Mass in Sioux City told one reporter, who the night before watched the Chiefs game in an abnormally empty bar.
Whiteout conditions stranded travelers in rural parts of the state; people got to and from work in rough conditions. Sunday seemed better, roadwise (Iowa’s robust crews have been at it), but while catching Vivek Ramaswamy half an hour outside Des Moines, I counted eight abandoned cars and drove through still drifting snow, which in the midday sun looked like driving through blue smoke.
It’s supposed to be minus 3 and feel like minus 21 when the caucuses start on Monday, which is somehow better than it’s been. When it was minus 17 with a much worse wind chill on Saturday night, it was like a burning force that you felt before you could think about what it was.
On Saturday, I layered up and decided to walk to a good coffee shop in Des Moines. Just when I almost made it there and was hyping my own layering, one foot went into a snowplow/drift zone, then another, then my bag was falling in the snow, then I was cratering right over. This was generally comical, but for one bad flash, I remembered that they say it’s dangerous to get wet in these temperatures and briefly thought I’d made a terrible mistake.
Basically all these campaigns are working extremely hard in the final days to try to extend an opening for themselves — for Ron DeSantis to stay alive in the race and for Nikki Haley to try to turn something here into a win in New Hampshire — in these complicated, disorientingly cold conditions. And then there’s something as simple as: Love you. Appreciate it.
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