Nikki Haley and the MAGA Mountain

What is this bullshit?

It’s the night before the Iowa caucuses and traffic is backed up for a half mile on the snow-covered road leading to Nikki Haley’s last event in Adel. Not because it’s a popular event but because a compact car with no four-wheel drive is blocking the entrance to the Country Lane Lodge, trying and failing to get up the icy hill.

The wheels spin, the car slides back. The wheels spin, the car slides back. Somewhere up there, Haley is starting her pitch.

Nikki Haley signs are placed in the snow during a caucus day to choose a Republican presidential candidate, in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. January 15, 2024.By Marco Bello/Reuters/Redux.

Finally, the driver gives up and performs a slow-motion five-point turn to leave, freeing up the long line of cars, which drive up to discover there’s no parking left, spurring a whole new pileup. One half expects Nikki Haley herself to come out and direct traffic, but no one comes, not even a staffer. We’re on our own.

As omens go, it was succinct: Instead of coming in second place in Iowa, as many had predicted, Nikki Haley fell behind the guy who fell behind Donald Trump. The guy who never learned to smile—and who would soon exit the race and throw his support to Trump—was second.

The seeming last hope for a post-Trump Republican Party, Haley has gambled on a soft-focus not-quite-never-Trumpism that might peel away doubters, independents, and even Democrats. As she told Dana Bash of CNN after Iowa, she didn’t want her children to grow up under Trump or Biden, whom she linked as a Frankenstein’s monster of American unhappiness. “People are tired of the division and the chaos,” she said. “We can’t go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”

In other words, Nikki Haley thinks that if Nikki Haley doesn’t survive in New Hampshire, none of us will.

To be sure, MAGA-rich Iowa was an extreme test case for a post-Trump GOP. But if New Hampshire is Haley’s last stand—the last stand of any last-standing Trump contender—she faces another icy hill, one with different political contours than Iowa but similarly steep. Even with Ron DeSantis out of the race, polls have her about 14 points behind Trump.

Facing Trump alone, Haley’s quip that “may the best woman win” was a wink at both her strength and her weakness inside the GOP. Stuart Stevens, the former Romney campaign operative and actually-never Trumper, told me Haley was a “small-time state politician who thinks she can be a big deal because she’s a woman, which in itself is such a pathetic commentary on the Republican Party. Has anybody noticed there’s a female vice president? She talks about her high heels like she’s something out of a Virginia Slims commercial from 1970.”

If 1970 is roughly where GOP feminism is, Haley has tried meeting voters there, suffering DeSantis’s smarmy allusions to her blush-colored dress while also showing up to an Iowa event in a full denim pantsuit with flared bottoms and tall black boots. Indeed, Iowa offered a view into how Haley’s campaign has navigated tricky GOP fault lines—and how formidable the MAGA wall still is. It’s a barrier against not only feminism, but reason, democracy, law, the Constitution, public comity, factual reality, and direct attacks against its current standard-bearer. And it stretches across the primary states ahead, from South Carolina to Idaho.

Air started leaking out of the Haley balloon during the CNN debate on Wednesday, January 10. That night, Desantis attacked the former South Carolina governor’s conservatism as “pale pastels,” watered down by her Wall Street donors, which was a direct hit—and a thinly-veiled gendered one. Meanwhile, Haley did everything short of tattooing “DeSantisLies.com” on her forehead. Together, their operatic desperation became mutually assured diminishment. But Haley had more to lose. In the spin room, campaign manager Betsy Ankney claimed Haley had made big strides in the debate—Haley mocking Ron DeSantis for blowing “more on private jets than commercials” in Iowa—but the bigger story was how relaxed Donald Trump seemed on Fox News, a mere 1.9 miles away.

L-R: A Trump volunteer with Barbie-themed MAGA hat at Trump headquarters in Urbandale, IA; Mary Doyle, a Trump volunteer, showing how not to hold a microphone at the campaign headquarters in Iowa; Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum interviewing Nikki Haley at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids.PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE HAGAN.

The next morning in an upscale suburb west of Des Moines, a large press pack showed up to see if Haley’s reported momentum was taking. Sharp, poised, appealingly reasonable, Haley delivered a well-oiled stump speech—the first time I’d seen her give one—that ran the narrow path between right-wing bromides for the base (cut taxes, kick out “illegals”) and a suburban, white-winier conservatism that harkens back to pre-2016 normality (no federal abortion ban; support Ukraine). Her campaign playlist of 1980s hits (which she had a hand in curating) included “Photograph” by Def Leppard, which seemed to signal the generation she meant when calling for “generational change.” She is the Gen X hair metal candidate (with Nikki Sixx–adjacent hair) who can lead you on with a liberal ballad like “We have to raise strong girls because strong girls become strong women and strong women become strong leaders,” before striking the right-wing power chord: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls sports.”

At the next stop, in Cedar Rapids, I talked to two Democrats, a 42-year-old woman and her mother, who said they could look past Haley’s right-wing policies (they were pro-choice) in hopes she’d take out Trump, whom they feared was a dictator-in-waiting. (In Iowa, Democrats and independents can switch party affiliations on-site to vote in Republican caucuses.) These are the kinds of voters Haley hopes will show up in South Carolina and the eight Super Tuesday states with open primaries, in which both Democrats and independents can vote. As Ankney told me, it was these kinds of voters who helped Trump take the nomination in 2016.

But there were at least a dozen empty seats in the hall in Cedar Rapids and the number of press had slackened considerably since the morning. Haley took no questions from the press, unless you counted Fox News. Reporters on her trail for the last many months told me her campaign had been allergic to the mainstream press. Dave Weigel of Semafor told me the campaign had held just one gaggle in Iowa since the state fair last August. Was it a disciplined media strategy or simply fear of a terrible gaffe like the one from last month when Haley seemed to forget the cause of the Civil War? The apparent gaffe exposed both Haley’s calculating political nature—fear that talking about racism in front of Republicans was political death since it’s not supposed to exist—and possibly a lack of surety on her feet. If her surge was real, maybe she couldn’t afford another off-script zinger like her promise that she would pivot to another “personality” in New Hampshire, which irked some Iowans. (Proving that her personality is indeed fixed, Haley reanimated the Civil War gaffe in New Hampshire when she told Fox News that America had “never been a racist country.”)

Whatever the strategy, it left a news vacuum for DeSantis and Trump to fill. The New York Times had around 50 people in the state, a bazooka aimed at a gnat. With a massive blizzard shutting down campaign stops and trapping the press in their hotels, Trump’s spokespeople and surrogates could take the elevator to the lobby and feed content-starved reporters. Arizona’s Kari Lake, a Trump surrogate in mega-MAGA-tan and a canary yellow sweater, held court before the Times’s Maureen Dowd, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, and New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh, and even tossed a bone to Vanity Fair, while making it clear she dislikes this place. “Nikki Haley is on the warmonger side of the Republican Party,” Lake told me, “which doesn’t exist anymore because Republicans don’t want to start endless wars. And so I think she should get behind President Trump.” (That last suggestion was a preview of Trump’s reported private pressure on Haley and DeSantis to drop out and get behind his candidacy.)

That night, when reporters converged on the candlelit speakeasy below the Hotel Fort Des Moines (the aptly-named In Confidence), Trump spokesman Jason Miller could idle at the bar, swirling his glass of brown liquor until 1 a.m., and dole out quotes. Reporters, starving for column inches, could be momentarily lulled into forgetting that these same people helped organize, promote, and otherwise spark a deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The next day, the DeSantis campaign dispensed with press credentials and ushered in a hundred or more reporters from the freakish cold, their crush of cameras and tape recorders obscuring the low number of actual DeSantis fans. With loudspeakers set to hearing-loss volume, the impression was of a high-wattage Ron DeSantis rally.

An open question for both voters and the press was, and remains, why Nikki Haley never attacks Donald Trump more forcefully and directly. David Kochel, a veteran GOP consultant (who hosted a Saturday night press party in which he sang AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” for the likes of MSNBC’s John Heilemann and CNN’s Dana Bash), told me that focus groups revealed that Republican voters became defensive if you attacked the former president. They plugged their ears.

“They won’t receive negative information because they live in a conservative media ecosystem that they rarely escape, and that trains them how to reflexively defend Trump,” Kochel explained. “They have all the talking points, all the rationale, so it’s really hard to attack.”

As a Haley staffer told me, “If going aggressively after him worked, you’d be talking to Chris Christie’s campaign right now.”

Haley and others have used what Kochel called a “permission structure,” a careful script in which the candidate first praises Trump for his presidency and policies and only then levels a criticism. In other words, you can attack Trump but you can’t sound like Joe Biden attacking Trump lest you become less Trump-like. Thus Haley’s effective if dainty jab at Trump: “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time…I agree with a lot of his policies…but rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”

At an open house at Trump headquarters in nearby Urbandale, Jason Miller blithely dismissed Haley’s “chaos” line with an attack on Joe Biden’s “chaos” and an analysis of Haley’s failed media strategy. In mock sympathy for her team (Barney Keller, Haley’s media consultant, is his former business partner), Miller said “If you haven’t done this before it can be daunting” and that blanketing the airwaves with TV ads was bush league stuff. In a national campaign, “it’s all about the candidate and the media,” he said. “It’s a different game.”

It was easy for him to say—his candidate is a media vortex unto himself. And what I witnessed of the MAGA machine underscored why nobody else stood a chance against Trump’s base of support in Iowa—and perhaps anywhere.

At the Trump headquarters, I asked Mary Doyle, a 69-year-old Iowan with short silver hair and a bright red Trump campaign sweatshirt if she had ever considered other candidates. She had—and found Nikki Haley the least appealing. “I’m big into body language,” she said, demonstrating how Haley held a microphone with the tips of her fingers—too delicate, Doyle concluded. “That spoke volumes to me,” she said. “You can’t treat the office of the president of the United States like it’s a delicate instrument.”

The presidency requires a really strong, manly microphone grip.

That night, when Trump live streamed an event from the hotel with a group of supporters behind him for window dressing, Mary sat directly over Trump’s right shoulder. When I saw her in the lobby afterward, beaming with delight, she told me she cried when she was tapped for the role.

L-R: The press pack at a Ron DeSantis rally; A Trump fan named Gene attends a campaign event at Simpson College; Dueling campaign signs on Drew University campus on night of CNN debate.By Joe Hagan.

The next day, I got in line for what would be my first in-person Trump rally, at Simpson College in Indianola. As the media speculated about the weather hindering turnout—it would be the lowest in Iowa caucus history—hundreds of Trump devotees stood in line starting at 8 a.m., undaunted by the painful and dangerous negative 18-degree cold. Behind me, a Dutch reporter asked a woman if she considered staying in bed that morning, and she replied without hesitation, “I would walk through broken glass for Trump.”

By comparison, after a half hour in line, I was prepared to vote for Trump if he’d only let me inside the building.

The event was overcapacity and the campaign set up an overflow room for voters to watch Trump on a movie screen. Inside the packed main room, I met a bearded man in his 60s named Gene who wore a “God, Guns and Trump” cap with two AR-15s and a cross stitched on the bill. Unprompted, Gene told me that both World War III and another American Civil War were distinct possibilities. “You see it in other countries and you say it will never happen in America but the things you see happening—it’s wholeheartedly what can happen.”

His vision was something out of Avengers: Endgame—an apocalyptic battle royale in which Trump is the God-sent savior and Captain America wrapped in one. While Joe Biden invited Mexico to “invade” America, the heartland stood firm against the forces of evil in crime-riddled New York and Los Angeles. “What we have in the Midwest is not what we see on the East and West Coasts,” said Gene.“We’ve got it made here in the Central United States. I mean, we go to the grocery store and we buy groceries. They go to the grocery stores and they find empty shelves.”

As we waited for Trump, we spied Laura Loomer, the social media troll and Trump-allied influencer, complete with bee-stung lips and heavy makeup, taking selfies in the VIP section. The night before, at the Fort Des Moines restaurant, Loomer trolled a DeSantis staffer who dined nearby, shooting video of her own performative harassment and posting it on Twitter. Trumpers play by different rules. I could see that poor Gene, a former B-52 pilot with a polyester-blend American flag shirt on his back, was beaming with conviction, ripe for Loomer’s “griftcore,” as a DeSantis surrogate had dubbed it.

Watching Trump rallies on TV is one thing but nothing prepared me for the fiendishly powerful stagecraft of Trump’s campaign. The event had all the hallmarks of an old-time tent revival, opening with an Iowa committeewoman leading a prayer (MAGA hats off, eyes closed) that asked God to let “the truth be revealed, falsehoods be exposed, and then those who have ill-gain or ill-motives of the broader nation be made known so we can handle them.”

“Amen,” said Gene. He liked the implications of “handle them.”

“We thank you for a man like Donald Trump,” said the committeewoman, “who did just that.”

The prayer was followed by a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance (MAGA hats back off, hands on hearts), followed by an a capella version of “The Star Spangled Banner” sung by a woman who got oh so very close to hitting the high note on “land of the freeeeeeee…,” thus completing the trifecta of stirring patriotic emotion.

What followed was a playlist of country and disco hits. Fresh-faced twentysomethings—more than one sees at DeSantis or Haley events—sang and danced along to “YMCA” while scrolling their right-wing social media feeds. A group of women next to me mouthed Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” like it was a Bible hymn; their male cohort mouthed Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).”

Trump surrogates and campaign captains—mini- and micro-celebrities of the Trump world, starring Ohio congressman Jim Jordan—appeared one by one, declaring their love for “Donald J. Trump” and riffing on his greatest hits. The messages were so well known to the crowd, repeated ad nauseam on Fox and Newsmax, that former Missouri congressman Billy Long could garble out a series of incoherent jokes, fragmented anecdotes, and humblebrags about his proximity to Trump (he evidently coined the phrase “Trump Train”) and nobody really cared. All that mattered were the memes. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah MAKE! AMERICA! GREAT! AGAIN! (cheers) blah, blah blah, blah, blah DONALD! J! TRUMP! (cheers).

After an hour and a half of flabby oratory from every shape and size of white man, it was clear these opening acts were, by design, meant to make Trump’s stardom more vivid by contrast—apostles opening for Jesus Christ Superstar. And if anyone missed the point, next came the notorious “God Made Trump” video montage, played shortly before Trump’s arrival, which uses a sonorous voiceover in the style of the late syndicated radio personality Paul Harvey to draw a direct line between the Creator of the Universe and the real estate tycoon from Manhattan. Quoting God, the voice intones, “I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.”

The vision of the former president pulling his own grandchild out of Ivanka didn’t seem to faze the crowd. They were fully vaccinated against irony. Behind me, Dana Bash of CNN and Robert Costa of CBS looked performatively stern as God described the media as “a den of vipers…their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s…the poison of vipers is on their lips.”

Finally—finally!—Lee Greenwood’s noxious country anthem “God Bless the USA” came over the PA, the cue for Donald Trump to step out from behind the curtain in his long overcoat, long red tie, and ten-gallon MAGA baseball cap and stand stock-still in front of three American flags. His face orange, hard eyes narrowed, and lips pursed, he turned slowly back-and-forth before a sea of raised phones and cries of adulation—a two-minute Riefenstahl-ian photo op like the one he gave on the balcony of the White House after his COVID hospitalization.

Removing his overcoat like a cape, he could now begin his bare-knuckle Catskills comedy routine. “Hey, look, you know, we have so much time today, there’s no football game today,” Trump said. “We got a lot of time. Should we do the long version or the short version?”

“LOOOOOONG!!!!”

In his lilting, sarcastic tone, he spun his indictments for trying to overthrow the government and for rape and for stealing government documents into pure comedy. His parents, he said, were “looking down from heaven saying, ‘My son’s been indicted for that?’ They didn’t know what the word indictment means! ‘What is it?’ I got indicted. I got indicted more than the late great gangster Alphonse Capone. He kills people.”

“Al Capone was indicted one time really,” he continued. “I had been indicted four times because I said the election was rigged! And I was right!” (He wasn’t. And he was also wrong about Al Capone, who was indicted six times.)

L-R: Ron DeSantis in a post-debate interview on CNN; The press room at the CNN debate between DeSantis and Haley at Drew University.By Joe Hagan.

The crowd laughed and yea-sayed. The message wasn’t merely about grievance and vengeance; observably, it was about the communal pleasure of grievance and vengeance. The media’s attention to Trump was their attention, a spotlight they could splash around in like a kiddie pool, along with demi-celebrities Billy Long and wrestler turned Trumper Dan Gable and lil “Jimmy” Jordan. When Trump promised to retake the White House for “four more years…and beyond,” the fascism was technicolor and candy-coated. There was no factual reality that couldn’t be obliterated by a one-liner with the force of a sledgehammer wrapped in an American flag. And merch tables piled high with T-shirts, caps, and beer koozies. As with Capone, Trump demanded loyalty, recalling with wistful pleasure the day Ron DeSantis came “begging for an endorsement, tears in his eyes” to save his campaign for governor of Florida. He promised the room that a vote for Trump would “score the ultimate victory over all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps, and other quite nice people,” instantly minting another meme the press and his fans couldn’t resist.

A serpent-tongued viper might call these true believers goobers, rubes, suckers, and dupes, but what good would it do? Haley and DeSantis were never going to break through this self-reinforcing wall of occult power. The race for the GOP nomination was, from the start, Coke and Pepsi versus a 50-gallon drum of Red Bull. And despite the media’s repeated nostrum that only people with high school educations favored Trump, The New York Times reported that same weekend that 60% of college-educated Republicans also supported him. This was real.

Afterward, at the Fort Des Moines Hotel, the Trump advance men and campaign captains poured back into the lobby with bulletproof confidence. In haberdashery and comportment, they aped Trump in long overcoats, long ties, and ten-gallon hats, idling like bored capos. Voluble and accessible, Jason Miller and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s media interfaces—“froggish men, unpleasant to see,” as Randy Newman once sang—held court in the lobby after hours, perfectly at ease in the den of vipers, bidding Maggie Haberman and the rest to pull up a chair. “I mean, Nikki doesn’t have something like this going on,” Miller had observed earlier. “I think DeSantis has a good chance to catch her on caucus night. If I had to make a prediction, that would be it.”

And he was right.

On CNN the next day, Nikki Haley called the Iowa outcome “exactly what we expected.” In fact, the expectation had been much different only a few days before, but she continued to play her weak hand like she had an ace hidden in it and framed the race as a two-person standoff between her and Trump going into New Hampshire, banking (correctly, as it turned out) on DeSantis running out of funds and bailing on his campaign. It’s true that 49% of the Iowa GOP didn’t vote for Trump, signifying deep doubts inside the party, but even as the race has narrowed, that fissure has yet to widen.

Can Nikki Haley get a wedge in? Her campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, is optimistic, if duty-bound, to promise a twist in the story.

“I think a lot of people in the press want to just throw up their hands and say, ‘Oh, well, it’s gonna be Trump,’” she tells me. “And the reality is, this is just beginning. We have had people vote in one state. It was a caucus in Iowa that is as tailor-made for Trump as it gets. And as this continues on, and more people see Nikki and more people realize that there is a better way, and a better alternative, I think that this is going to get really interesting.”

A nation turns its lonely eyes to Nikki.

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