Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses Monday night.
Big.
Trump reeled in 51 percent of the vote in Iowa, which was 30 points better than Ron DeSantis’ 21 percent. Nikki Haley came in third with 19 percent, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who pulled 7 percent and change, pulled out of the GOP presidential race after a fourth-place finish. (READ MORE: Iowa Knockout: A Caucus Turns Into a Coronation)
Haley, strangely enough, had this to say after a third-place finish:
When you come in third but claim it's a "two-way" race.
Clown behavior from Nikki Haley. https://t.co/NTBoXoXFKp
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 16, 2024
OK, she didn’t have a clown mask on when she said it, but she might as well have.
Is it true, though?
It could be.
There is truth in the insinuation of Haley’s that DeSantis is no longer a viable presidential candidate. He isn’t. He hasn’t been for a while, truth be told. When the Joe Deadhorse, er, Biden, administration decided to raid Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago and then unleash a torrent of unprecedented lawfare attacks courtesy of a rogue federal prosecutor and a pair of blue-city partisan hack district attorneys in New York and Atlanta, it eliminated any real chance that the public was interested in moving on from Trump 1.0 and engaging Trump 2.0, as DeSantis had originally framed himself.
And he didn’t do himself any favors when he allowed donors to talk him out of a correct stance on the Ukraine war, namely, that it is essentially a border conflict between the Ukrainians and the Russians rather than some sort of messianic struggle between “democracy” and “tyranny.” Once he’d been persuaded to crawfish on that position, those voters who were considering DeSantis as a real populist-conservative alternative to Trump decided they’d be better off with the real McCoy.
Not that it mattered. DeSantis could have run a perfect campaign, and he still wouldn’t be able to unseat Trump as king of the hill. It isn’t his time.
But 2028 might yet still be. And that’s why DeSantis shouldn’t heed the calls from — among others in the ruling-class political establishment — the Wall Street Journal to drop out of the race.
You’ll notice that the WSJ didn’t demand that Haley also drop out, despite the patently obvious fact that Trump will be the GOP nominee. Why wouldn’t it do that? After all, Haley spent more money in Iowa than DeSantis did and drove a worse result. And it’s even clearer that the paltry result she did manage wasn’t particularly reflective of that state’s voter sentiment:
CBS News' @tonydokoupil reports from a precinct in Johnston, Iowa, where some registered Democrats filled out forms to switch to the Republican Party to participate in the caucus: "They ran out of those forms."
"This room was in favor of Nikki Haley." pic.twitter.com/BapNjVGxdh
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 16, 2024
Haley might have finished below Ramaswamy in Iowa were it not for those Democrats whom her big-donor money dragooned to the caucuses. Who knows?
She was repudiated in Iowa. More than 80 percent of the caucus-goers — probably closer to 90 percent among actual Republicans — rejected her. Absolutely she ought to drop out.
Instead, she’s saying she’s viable and DeSantis is not because she’s going to do well in New Hampshire. And why? Because there will be even more Democrats polluting the GOP primary there. As Tucker Carlson noted during a 17-minute podcast released Tuesday on the subject of Haley, her New Hampshire voters don’t seem to be very engaged with Republican or conservative messaging or principles:
Ep. 65 What the results in Iowa mean. pic.twitter.com/fVAObbJWIB
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 16, 2024
In this, Haley assumes she’ll be able to take a similar path to the GOP nomination that her fellow neocon/Bush Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney did — ride crossover voters in open primaries to enough victories to make her relevant, if not the nominee.
And, as Carlson notes, given the chance that Trump might find himself in jail as a result of the Joe Deadhorse/Obama Cabal’s lawfare campaign — or the potential that continued agitation by Democrat operatives in the political class or media talking heads might induce some latter-day James Hodgkinson to lay in wait for Trump with a rifle — a Nikki Haley standing as the only option for the GOP could be a realistic scenario.
That, in and of itself, would be a reason for DeSantis to hang in there. There will be lots of primaries going forward in which he would be in a position to finish ahead of Haley, and it would mark him as a more natural emergency nominee.
But that isn’t why Ron DeSantis needs to stay in the race. He needs to stay in it with the knowledge that he isn’t going to win without something catastrophic happening to Trump.
DeSantis should stay in the race with the express purpose of destroying Nikki Haley as a political entity.
He needs to do it for selfish reasons, because discrediting her and chasing her out of the GOP means DeSantis would be the de-facto frontrunner for 2028. Serving as Trump’s attack dog for the rest of the campaign could be a platform for a rapprochement between the two that the Republican Party needs going forward, and that could inure to DeSantis’ benefit in the form of Trump either endorsing him or merely not standing in his way when the 2028 cycle gets going.
But, most of all, Ron DeSantis needs to stick around and eviscerate Haley because the Republican Party cannot revert to the mediocre, base-betraying, donor-class-slave Washington Generals operation that it was between 1988 and 2016 and seems to want to become again.
As I’ve written about extensively — particularly in my bestselling first political book The Revivalist Manifesto, which CNN will inform you is “racist,” “homophobic,” and “filled with conspiracy theories” — that Republican Party is as or more responsible for the decline in American culture, politics, and economics than any other political faction. The GOP’s future — hell, America’s future — rests on closing the chapter of the Romneys, Bushes, McConnells, and Haleys and moving on to what I would call a revivalist posture.
DeSantis is a revivalist, as are Trump and Ramaswamy. Between them, they pulled 81 percent (or more, if you account for the Democrat interlopers who crashed the caucuses to vote for Haley) of the party’s voters in Iowa.
Trump doesn’t need to spend his time attacking Haley. He needs to busy himself destroying Joe Deadhorse and the Obama Cabal pulling Joe’s strings. (Read more about that in my new book, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, which I will not stop plugging until all of you have bought a copy.) That has to be DeSantis’ job, because DeSantis is now fighting for his own political future and that of the America First/Revivalist movement that positively must become the active ingredient — the Establishment, even — of the Republican Party.
It’s more important that this fight be won than it is that DeSantis go back to Florida. He has to block Haley and the corrupt donor class — like Epstein flight passenger Reid Hoffman of the Big Tech leftist social platform LinkedIn — from using Haley to carve out a chunk of the GOP’s future.
It’s a dirty job. But if he does it, a grateful party and nation might just reward him for it down the road.
