Inside Donald Trump’s cut-throat conquest of Iowa and New Hampshire

Donald Trump’s campaign couldn’t have scripted the results in Iowa any better.

Except for a single vote.

Standing backstage at his victory party in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month, Trump appeared almost giddy with disbelief as television screens blared the news of an outcome so lopsided that it was called while the voting was still under way. He had won more than 50 per cent of the vote – and 98 of the state’s 99 counties – and his rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, were clustered together far behind. DeSantis edged just ahead of Haley, enough to stall her momentum but not enough to save his candidacy.

“Did you think it was going to be like this?” Trump remarked to an adviser, according to two people who witnessed the interaction.

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That night, the former president and his usual coterie of top aides were joined by about a dozen Iowa staffers headed for New York, boarding the plane his campaign calls Trump Force One.

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Not everyone was invited. Trump had lost Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa, by a single vote. The regional political director who had overseen the area was not given a seat on the plane. The next morning, according to two people familiar with the matter, she was informed by a terse email from her supervisor that her contract with the Trump campaign was not being renewed.

It was the type of ruthlessness that the Trump team had deployed in the previous 14 months: win – or else. The approach has fit the requirements of a candidate who faces the threat of imprisonment if impending trials and the 2024 presidential race do not go his way.

On Tuesday, Trump beat Haley by 11 percentage points in New Hampshire, the early state where she had not long ago seemed best situated to score an upset win. His victory came only one week after DeSantis lost Iowa, his strongest early state, so badly that he exited the race.

How Trump swept the first two states is certainly a tale of cut-throat politics. But that’s only part of the story.

The former president and his allies had luck and a cunning strategy on their side. They put Trump’s unerring instincts for revving up the Republican base and belittling his opponents to effective use. He benefitted from criminal indictments that rallied Republicans around him and a fractured opposition that spent millions of dollars savaging each other instead of him – a replay of the 2016 Republican primaries. Along the way, Trump consistently evaded ideological labels, along with misguided and mistimed efforts to diminish him.

In 2016, Trump finished in fifth place among voters in Iowa who had said “shares my values” was their top criteria, winning a meagre 5 per cent of such voters, according to entrance polls. In 2024, Trump dominated that category, pulling in 43 per cent of those voters.

Trump’s values had not changed. The party’s had.

The Trump team couldn’t believe its luck in October when Haley’s super political action committee – which fundraises for her campaign – began to reserve advertising time attacking DeSantis.

From the beginning of the campaign, Trump and his top advisers had seen DeSantis as their only serious rival. They had spent months savaging him. Haley had started her campaign with no money and with polling in the single digits. But by autumn, she was vying with DeSantis in early-state polls after her August debate performance won positive reviews.

Haley’s rise drained DeSantis’ resources. One of his allied super Pacs, Fight Right, spent 25 times as much money, nearly $10 million, attacking Haley compared with what it spent hitting Trump, federal records show.

And the money kept coming. On November 28th, one of the most financially powerful institutions on the right came to Haley’s aid. The political network founded by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch endorsed Haley and began spending millions of dollars to elevate her. It deployed its massive field organisation to knock on doors in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But several Koch network donors began raising questions about the decision.

Investor Chart Westcott sent a text message to other Koch donors, describing the endorsement as a “half-baked moonshot”, adding that “outside of Trump being a corpse, there is no path, zero, for Haley to the nomination”.

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A spokeswoman for Haley, Olivia Perez-Cubas, said in response in an interview that Haley had begun at 2 per cent in a 14-person race and that “in a few months, we cleared the field, raced to 43 per cent in New Hampshire and made it a two-person race. We’re just getting started”. She added that Haley would continue to fight for “the 70 per cent of all Americans who don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch”.

Trump advisers were stunned that no lessons had apparently been learned from 2016. Even the two early-state Republican governors determined to defeat Trump in 2024 found themselves working at cross purposes. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds endorsed DeSantis. New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu backed Haley.

Once again, Trump’s opponents had divided and conquered themselves.

The final result in Iowa, with DeSantis barely edging Haley, was optimal for Trump: DeSantis had nowhere to go and Haley had been slowed.

In Iowa, Trump happily watched the results roll in, taking pictures with staff members in front of television screens showing the landslide, inviting advisers onstage with him. Onstage, a beaming Trump made what, for him, amounted to magnanimous remarks about his vanquished opponents.

It was a far cry from his tone a week later in New Hampshire.

By the time Trump flew out of Iowa, the plan to squash Haley, his former United Nations ambassador, in New Hampshire was well under way.

The Trump campaign and its allied super Pac spent millions of dollars hammering her with television ads, squeezing her simultaneously from the left on social security – just as his operation had done with DeSantis – and from the right on immigration.

In private discussions, Trump had dangled the possibility of a Haley vice-presidency for weeks. He said publicly only that she was not cut from the proper “timber” days before New Hampshire voted – and after Haley had said being his running mate was “off the table”. It was after the “timber” remark that Haley more explicitly questioned Trump’s mental acuity.

In the last days before the primary, Trump, online and onstage, boasted of endorsements from senior elected officials from South Carolina – the state where Haley had served as governor.

As the polls opened in New Hampshire, the Trump team wavered between confidence and anxiety. They knew he had a strong grip on Republicans, but the big unknown was how many independent voters would show up for Haley.

The answer was a lot. But Trump’s hold on the Republican base was overwhelming: exit polls showed him winning 74 per cent of registered Republicans.

Still, Trump grew agitated as he watched returns with aides in a room at the Sheraton hotel in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was gobsmacked when Haley took to the stage and gave what he heard as an attempt to frame her loss as a victory.

“Why didn’t I go first?” Trump asked his aides.

Haley’s speech seemed designed to get under Trump’s skin. She questioned his cognitive abilities.

By the time he took the stage in the Sheraton ballroom, Haley had lodged herself firmly inside his head. He fired one shot after another. It didn’t sound like a victory speech. Haley later called it a “temper tantrum”.

He had won the first two states – a feat never achieved by any Republican who wasn’t a sitting president. But Trump had grudges to settle, mocking his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in a social media post aboard his plane. “I don’t get too angry,” he had explained during his speech. “I get even.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times

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