Democrats seize on Iowa results to campaign on threats posed by Trump

Top Democrats did not react to Donald Trump’s crushing win in the Iowa caucuses on Monday with the dismay that might have been expected. Instead, the victory of the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president was heralded as an early beginning to the battle for the White House itself.

Called early, Trump’s victory came by 30 points over the hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who edged the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for second. Only one of 99 Iowa counties did not go for Trump: Johnson county, which includes the University of Iowa, was won by Haley, the relative moderate left in the race – by a single vote.

Responding to Trump’s win, and using an acronym for Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again”, Biden told followers: “Here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me versus extreme Maga Republicans. It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow.”

Reporting has long suggested Biden and his advisers want to face Trump at the polls in November. Doing so will allow them to campaign more on the threat Trump poses to American democracy than the virtues of Biden himself, a historically unpopular president facing doubts about his age (81 now, 86 at the end of a second term), his handling of the economy and his support for Israel in its war with Hamas.

On Tuesday, the former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, now a Biden campaign co-chair, told MSNBC: “You have seen in the last five or six months every candidate for the presidency on the Republican side racing over to the extreme Maga side of the party that Donald Trump clearly owns.

“The Republican party that used to be a really great part of the American political system is dead. Donald Trump owns the Maga