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.”
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