WEIRD NIGHT IN IOWA: TRUMP HAPPY AS DESANTIS AND HALEY TRASH EACH OTHER. Des Moines — This was the night Iowa Republicans finally got to see Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley all in Des Moines — but unfortunately not all in the same place. Trump, leading by 35 points in the first-voting state, took part in a town hall on Fox News at the Iowa Events Center, while his two way-back challengers, virtually tied with each other less than a week before the caucuses, had a one-on-one debate on CNN a couple of miles away at Drake University.
Here is the main story of the night: It was the culmination of Trump’s strategy of refusing to take part in debates, instead leaving his rivals to fight each other while he makes his case to voters on his own. Of course, no one has actually voted yet, so it’s too early to say for sure, but Wednesday night in Des Moines made Trump’s strategy look brilliant. He connected with viewers in the townhall while DeSantis and Haley beat the hell out of each other nonstop in their debate.
At one point, the former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, now vehemently anti-Trump, posted on X, “Do Haley and DeSantis know that Trump is leading by a large margin? The first 30 minutes of this debate is both of them attacking each other and not laying a glove on Trump. So far this debate will help Trump.” That held true for the second 30 minutes of the debate and the third 30 minutes of the debate, as well. There was a bit of Trump criticism in one later segment of the debate, but the two then resumed their attacks on each other.
It started in the opening seconds. Co-moderator Jake Tapper started off with an entirely anodyne question: “Gov. DeSantis, why should voters who are looking for an alternative to the current front-runner, former President Trump, vote for you, rather than former Gov. Haley?” DeSantis briefly made the case for his record in Florida and then tore into Haley. She is a “mealy-mouthed politician” who “tells you what she thinks you want to hear” and then, when she wins office, does “her donors’ bidding.” She said Iowa caucusgoers’ votes “need to be corrected.” She said that “Hillary Clinton inspired her to first run for office,” and remember, Clinton called Republicans “deplorables,” so Haley will “look down on Middle America.” That was all in DeSantis’s opening statement.
Haley had a brief moment to respond in which she might have risen above the slugfest DeSantis wanted. She didn’t. Instead, she touted a new website her campaign has created, DeSantisLies.com, which she said would catalog the untruths DeSantis has told about her. It would show readers that DeSantis is “only mad about the donors because the donors used to be with him” and that he is really upset “about the fact that his campaign is exploding.” And that he has “switched his policies multiple times.” “But every time he lies,” Haley said, getting to the punchline, “don’t turn this into a drinking game because you will be overserved by the end of the night.” As it turned out, one could have gotten really loaded by drinking every time Haley mentioned DeSantisLies.com. She did it 16 times during the course of the debate.
And that was pretty much how it went for nearly all of the night. The two spent relatively little time attacking the man who is beating both of them, Trump, and even less time attacking the man the Republican Party wants to defeat in November, President Joe Biden. Instead, it was attack, attack, attack the rival standing next to them onstage.
So this is the situation in the Republican presidential race: Trump is leading by 35 points with four days to go before the caucuses, and DeSantis and Haley spent the night, their only debate in Iowa, with time ticking away, whacking each other.
After it was over, I asked Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who, after Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA), is DeSantis’s biggest endorser, if that made any sense. He of course wanted to talk about how well he thought DeSantis performed, but at the same time, he noted that he “sensed a bit of uneasiness in the room because of when they’d go after each other instead of saying, ‘Let’s go after Biden,’ or ‘Let’s go after Trump.’” In other words, people in the audience, mostly Iowa Republicans who want to beat Biden with a candidate other than Trump, sensed there was something off about the night.
Give Vander Plaats credit for acknowledging that. Other surrogates who spoke to reporters after the debate, (briefly) presidential candidate and former Rep. Will Hurd for Haley and DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo, wouldn’t even entertain the notion that anything was wrong. They talked past the fact that the two candidates spent most of their time attacking each other and instead stressed Haley’s and DeSantis’s relatively brief criticisms of Trump and Biden, as if that had been the main show.
For his part, Trump sailed through his town hall with many of the questions coming from Iowans who already support him. That was to be expected. After all, according to the polls, if you gathered a representative sample of Iowa Republicans who plan to vote in the caucuses, a majority of them would be for Trump. But the most important part of the town hall was that it was another moment in which Trump, by turning down the invitation to debate DeSantis and Haley, reinforced his image as the de facto incumbent president and stayed above the mudslinging of the also-rans. Trump looked like a president because, of course, he has been a president.
One final thing about the night. With the race coming down to its final days, who would have guessed that a big part of the story would be…Chris Christie? But there the former New Jersey governor was, announcing just before the debate and town hall that he was dropping out of the race. Christie, who the polls consistently showed was the least-liked Republican in the race, was a non-factor in Iowa, with 3.4% support in the RealClearPolitics average, but a player in New Hampshire, where polls put him in third place, behind Trump and Haley, with 12%.
Haley supporters had been begging Christie to drop out because they believe nearly all of his voters will switch to Haley, who has become the race’s Great Anti-Trump Hope. But Christie, living up to his reputation as most unpopular Republican, managed to dump all over the moment by being heard on a microphone that just happened to be live while he was having a private conversation before a New Hampshire event. And in that private moment, Christie said of Haley: “She’s going to get smoked, and you and I both know it. She’s not up to this.”
That’s a heck of an endorsement. In fact, Christie, even though he is no longer in the race, is not endorsing anyone. One person who talked with him this week noted that he is quite angry with Haley for not, in his view, attacking Trump vigorously enough. Of course, that hasn’t worked too well, evidenced by the fact that Haley is a major player in the race and Christie is out of the game. For her part, Haley, who desperately needs Christie’s supporters, had to put a good face on things, posting on X, “Chris Christie has been a friend for many years. I commend him on a hard-fought campaign.”
Christie’s valedictory summation — “She’s going to get smoked” — did have its fans. Obviously, the DeSantis folks loved it. They called it the major news of the night even after their man had spent two hours talking onstage. And Trump loved it, too. “I happen to believe that Chris Christie is right,” he told Fox News. “That’s one of the few things he’s been right about, actually.”
In the end, Wednesday night in Des Moines was the best opportunity Republicans have had to see the race in its entirety in (almost) one place. And the picture that resulted was not particularly appealing. The two candidates chasing the front-runner spent most of their time bashing each other, the also-ran who dropped out messed things up by trashing the candidate who most needed his help, and the leader of the pack sailed along unscathed by it all.
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