The Globe in Iowa: Trust me, Trump’s political clout is real

Share

For a brief moment, it seems Donald Trump is in on the joke.

Some 50 minutes into a meandering speech to hundreds of supporters in a college auditorium in Pella, Iowa, on Saturday, the bouffanted billionaire hints that his over-the-top campaign persona is a put-on. If he becomes his country's 45th president, he says, he would tone it down.

"Right now, I'm fighting all these guys. All of them, or most of them, are lying about me. I have to be a little aggressive. When I'm president, I'm a different person," he says. "I can do anything. I can be the most politically-correct person that you've ever seen. I can leave a dinner and everyone would say, 'What a fine, outstanding man!' "

It would be nice to believe this was more than just another line of braggartly bluster. After all, from the outside looking in, it's almost easier to believe Mr. Trump's campaign is all an act, something between performance art and the realest of reality television.

Would that it were that simple. Spend three hours in a room with Mr. Trump and a legion of his cheering fans, and you will be convinced of one thing: At least on some level, this is real.

To a Canadian eye, Pella is the kind of postcard Middle American town you probably don't entirely believe actually exists. The bustling, picturesque Main Street of perfectly preserved 1800s brick commercial buildings; the blocks of modest clapboard houses adorned with American flags, housing 10,000 people surrounded by snow-covered plains.

So it's a strangely appropriate place to connect with Mr. Trump's campaign, which embodies nearly every caricatured stereotype of American politics: Rich, brash businessman hates on immigrants and loves guns, and people want to elect him president. It's a little hard to believe this could be real. It's a little like landing on another planet.

And, of course, there is religion. The rally opens with a prayer.

"Any nation that reverences You will be blessed by You and any nation that rejects You will be rejected by You," a pastor says. "We come today to thank You for Donald Trump, who selflessly has offered himself for service to this country, for no other reason than his desire to make America great again."

Then, amid chants of "USA! USA!" the candidate himself takes the stage.

He holds court for more than an hour, speaking in a breathless, almost stream-of-consciousness style, careening from topic to topic, frequently interrupting himself and whipping off on lengthy digressions.

He takes shots at the media gathered at the back of the room ("the most dishonest people I've ever met, honestly" and "scum"); pundit Glenn Beck, who endorsed Mr. Trump's rival Ted Cruz earlier in the day ("Every time I see him, he's crying. He's a whack job," Mr. Trump says, using his hands to mime tears streaming down his face); and the National Review, the arch-conservative magazine that devoted an entire issue the previous day to 22 essays detailing why Mr. Trump should not become president ("This crazy National Review, nobody reads it any more, it's a dying publication," he says).

Even New York theatre critics have apparently earned Mr. Trump's ire for being too harsh on Broadway productions. "The actors and the producers and the editors and the directors, they put their guts into it, and then you get savaged in The New York Times … they're so mean, they're so nasty. I never liked critics."

A long digression defending eminent domain (the U.S. term for property expropriation) suddenly turns into both an explanation of a new Keystone XL policy and an attack on Mr. Cruz's citizenship (the Texas senator was born in Calgary). "You couldn't build five feet of the Keystone Pipeline without eminent domain. It's going through peoples' farms, it's going through peoples' houses. It's going from Canada – Cruz's former home – it might still be his home. Actually, he has a better chance of running for Prime Minister of Canada," he says. "I want Keystone…it's really good for Canada, which is fine, they're a good neighbour, but I want like 25 per cent of the profits forever."

Then there's this bizarre metaphor, delivered as Mr. Trump makes an arm motion as if pulling a big pile of money towards himself: "All my life, I've been greedy, I want money; now I'm going to be greedy for the United States. I'm going to take it all."

The audience loves it. They reward this line, and just about every other, with raucous applause and shouts of approval. Many wave signs reading, ironically, "The Silent Majority Stands with Trump."

One particularly enthusiastic sign-waver, 65-year-old Mary Brandt, catches his attention.

"Thank you, darling, you're so nice! I love you!" he says.

"I love you!" she shouts back.

I ask Ms. Brandt what she likes about Mr. Trump. It turns out there's a lot.

For one, she's drawn to his promise to renegotiate or pull out of trade deals: NAFTA, she says, once cost her a job on an air conditioning assembly line when the company moved some of its operations to Mexico.

She also resents Obamacare for obliging companies to provide health insurance ("that company hires you do to a job; they shouldn't have to hire you and also help pay for your insurance"); Hillary Clinton for creating the Children's Health Insurance Program ("I'm not against children having health care, but nothing is free, somebody had to pay for that. I had to pay for their child's and my child's health care. Uh-uh. That's not right"); and argues the country has been going downhill for decades ("We went wrong militarily as far as I'm concerned when we withdrew out of Vietnam").

Ms. Brandt now works in a daycare centre and says she worries for the futures of the children she looks after. "These poor little darlings are going to be slaves, absolute slaves. Their parents, their grandparents already are," she tells me.

The issues that draw Mr. Trump's supporters today vary. The pledge to tear up free trade deals comes up often; others like his promise to crack down on illegal immigration by building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The overarching theme is disaffection with the political system, a sense that government isn't improving peoples' lives and a belief that Mr. Trump's blunt bluster is a sign of authenticity.

"He's not a career politician. I'm tired of voting for the same rhetoric and expecting different results," says Jerry Thompson, a 55-year-old factory worker, who wants to see NAFTA go. "We need somebody that's going to change things, shake things up."

Says Jody Hovey, a 42-year-old sheriff's deputy: "That's why I like him: He has no political ties to anybody. He's his own man. He doesn't owe anybody anything."

Rod Stalsberg, 52, a real estate investor, likes Mr. Trump's chest-thumping patriotism. "He's proud to be an American, and I think that we've really lost that over the past several years."

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the day is that, despite the undercurrent of rage driving Mr. Trump's campaign – and my status as "scum" – the people I meet in the audience are all unfailingly courteous and polite with me.

Well, most of them.

Wayne Jessee, a 69-year-old optician with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, has a question for me.

"You're from Canada?"

"Yes."

"You guys from Canada, shame on ya for letting in the Syrians."

It's like he knew there was a stereotype to keep up.