Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump gestures before speaking at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) | AP
The Teflon don moves on. The more indictments, the greater the lead as facts don't matter, pr does in the case of Agent Orange, the only repug able to suck out all of the oxygen in the room. No other GOP candidate comes close to the malignant charisma of The Donald and his 30 pt lead in the polls shows just how true that fact truly is. It matters not the number of indictments as the 30-40 million MAGAS he has in his back pocket will not abandon their guy no matter just how reprehensible and craven Trump may be.
DES MOINES — It didn’t matter to the Republicans gathered in the convention center ballroom Friday that he’d hurled insults at their wildly popular governor, or that he is facing a cascade of federal charges.
When Donald Trump strode on stage here for a major gathering of GOP presidential candidates in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, the entire room of party faithful rose to their feet and roared. In an apparently accidental twist, even the walkout music that played hinted at his situation — “One could end up going to prison; one just might be president,” went the Brooks & Dunn song, bits of which played for every candidate that spoke here.
But once again, the former president demonstrated he was still the most dominant force in the room — a hall that had just featured a dozen Republicans also running for the nomination.
As forks and knives clanked over plates of chicken and mashed potatoes at the state GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner, Trump’s reception was a demonstration of the reality that continues to dog the rest of the Republican presidential field: seemingly no conventional rules of politics apply to him.
“There’s only one candidate — and you know who that candidate is — to get the job done,” Trump said to applause. And the room laughed when he cited a poll that showed Ron DeSantis losing in a matchup with Joe Biden, cautioning that he “wouldn’t take a chance on that one.”
And this ...
Former Vice President Mike Pence, whose campaign has struggled, was among the candidates who avoided criticizing Mr. Trump at the Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines on Friday.
Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times
Candidate after candidate at an Iowa Republican dinner on Friday avoided so much as mentioning the dominant front-runner in the race, former President Donald J. Trump.
But when Mr. Trump took the stage after more than two hours of speeches by his lower-polling rivals, it took him less than three minutes to unleash his first direct attack of the night on his leading challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Mr. Trump not only suggested that Mr. DeSantis was an “establishment globalist” but called him “DeSanctis,” which in Mr. Trump’s argot is short for the demeaning nickname DeSanctimonious and is so well-known that most attendees clearly got the reference. “I wouldn’t take a chance on that one,” Mr. Trump joked.
The crowd of more than 1,200, which had warmly welcomed Mr. DeSantis when he spoke earlier, laughed and applauded throughout Mr. Trump’s riffs.
In contrast, Mr. DeSantis hadn’t mentioned the former president at all. The one speaker who did criticize Mr. Trump at length, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas — who is so far from contention that he’s not even attempting to qualify for the first Republican debate next month — was booed off the stage.
Malignant charisma indeed.
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