Bellwether State?

"One hundred people showing up for a staffer? I've never seen anything like it. They kept saying the same thing: They want something different."
"We're reaching people that the Republican apparatus doesn't even know exist. The other day, one woman came up to say, 'Hello, a lifelong Iowan' Her first question to us was, 'What's a caucus?' After we told her, she wanted to help. Politics has not been the biggest thing in a lot of these people's lives. They've got lots of stuff going on with their jobs or families. But they feel Donald Trump is what this country needs."
Chuck Laudner, Iowa organizer, Trump campaign

"I see them as a major threat to all the other campaigns because of the aggressiveness of the ground game."
"You cannot swing a dead cat in Iowa and not hit a Trump person. It's unlike anything I've ever seen .. Every event we go to ... the Boone Country Eisenhower Social, the Black Hawk County Lincoln Dinner, the Boots and Barbecue down in Denison -- the Trump people are everywhere with literature and T-shirts and signing people up."
"The Trump bus will pull into an empty parking lot and just be there on the main drag, like the little town of LeMars, 'the ice cream capital of the world' ... People will pull over, go sign up. They'll get 50 people in an hour and go to another town. That happens all over the state."
Sam Clovis, Iowa conservative

"I've told people from the beginning: Never  underestimate Donald Trump."
"He has been very successful for a reason. He knows how to market and specifically he knows how to market himself very well. He also understands what the customer wants."
Bob Vander Plaats, president, Family Leader conservative group

Illustration by Elias Stein

Well, why not? America has elected some pretty strange leaders, from a peanut farmer to a grade B actor. One was guided by a born-again vision of Christ-like action throughout the world stage, and led the United States into a position of global derision, the other was a frontman for corporate interests who fired air traffic controllers and by force of psychic will ordered the Evil Empire to "tear this wall down".

Since money can buy anything and often does, other than exemption when Death comes calling, a self-promoting, self-idealizing windbag with cutthroat business tendencies and plenty of cash to sprinkle about like pixiedust is setting out to prove that the electorate really is one giant moronic beast. They like Donald Trump's unadorned honesty, taking his blunt ill-thought statements as an assurance of intelligence and forthrightness.

They, at least then, deserve the soul-shrinking prospect of a man of his calibre becoming president of the United States of America.

His statements are considered honest wisdom uttered by a man unfazed by the constraints of civil decency, and one can only suppose his demeanor and his pronouncements echo their own feeble thoughts. A man of the people. His irresistible draw brings them out in hordes, applauding his blunt rudeness and his self-adoring chauvinism.

A CNN-ORC poll places him in first place among prospective Republican presidential candidates in Iowa, at 22 percent. His closest competitor in the popularity rating comes in at 14 percent, with the third-place at 9 percent. Ahead of the pack, he is. Destined to be the front-runner, and come out, in the end as the Republican choice to run against the Democratic front-runner?

Not that the Democrats will present a candidate whose credentials will be overwhelmingly votable.

But whoever it is, she or he, the Republicans will have handed the presidency over to them, and they should be grateful to The Donald.

www.dreamstime.com

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trumps bus at a campaign rally in Iowa.