Digested week: regular-sounding folk suspend disbelief over Trump

There wasn’t much to laugh to about when the Iowa caucus results came in on Monday, although the New York Post, erstwhile endorser of second place candidate, Ron DeSantis, raised a smile with the evidently vein-popping effort it had to put into finding a normal-sounding quote from Donald Trump. “Trump easily wins Iowa caucus in historic landslide, urges unity to ‘straighten out death and destruction’,” was the best they could eke from slim pickings.

Results from Iowa famously don’t predict presidential election outcomes; since 1972, when the first caucuses were held, only three winners in Iowa have gone on to become president, and only one of them – George W Bush – on the Republican side. In previous years, this observation might have been useful, but in the case of Trump, of course, citing precedent doesn’t get us anywhere. The same week of his landslide in Iowa, Trump appeared, once again, in a court in downtown Manhattan, to face E Jean Carroll in her second defamation suit against him. The first suit last year ended when a judge found Trump guilty of libel and sexual abuse and awarded Carroll $5m (£3.95m) in damages, a fact that has, apparently, had no impact whatsoever on the 42% of Americans who recently gave him a favourable rating.

Accounting for this disconnect gets harder. Reporters in Iowa on the day of the caucus threw up the now familiar conundrum of otherwise regular-sounding folk – people working in the ethanol industry, small business owners, retired farmers and insurance agents – expressing if not full-throated support for Trump, then at least a willingness to suspend disbelief. On the subject of the January 6 storming of the Capitol, an otherwise measured sounding man told the New Yorker: “It’s confusing,