There’s something to Hannity’s note of triumphalism. Trump won the Iowa caucuses by the largest margin of victory in its history, and he appears to be on a glide path to the 2024 Republican nomination. A majority of the voters who turned out to the caucuses picked the candidate who left office after trying to subvert the results of the election he lost and instigating a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and who promises retribution and authoritarianism if he returns to the White House.
But there’s another side to the story: Trump is a former president of the United States, which makes him different from every other candidate to previously stand for election at the Iowa caucuses. He’s effectively an incumbent, with the vast majority of potential party voters having already voted for him before: In 2020, exit polls showed 93% of Iowa Republicans cast their ballots for him in the general election. And on Monday, just under half of the caucus attendees who braved the snow and the freezing temperatures did so in order to support someone else.
Why did those Iowans want someone else? Are they really into, as Hannity put it, the “weaponized and politicized” system of justice and anti-Trump “witch hunts”?
Indeed, Trump’s numerous criminal indictments and election denial may be a factor. Entrance polls show 64% of Republican caucus voters say Trump is still fit to be president if he is convicted of a crime, and 65% wrongly believe Biden did not win legitimately in 2020. But while those figures are a testament to the hold Trump and his right-wing media propagandists have on his party, they still leave 3 in 10 Republican caucus voters on the other side. Together with polling showing that more than a quarter of likely Republican caucusgoers say they would not support Trump if he is the nominee, that indicates a significant vulnerability for Trump in the general election.
But Hannity and his Trumpist guests were curiously uninterested in what would make an Iowa Republican show up for someone other than Trump.
Instead, they cooed over the size of Trump’s win. Former Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway told Hannity that “Trump got win, place, show,” while her former colleague Stephen Miller touted the “thunderous victory tonight — history-making, history-shaking.”
They attacked the media for not understanding Trump’s appeal.
“The biggest gap we have is actually between the mainstream media and the American people, specifically college-educated Democrats who are really reporters, the mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and their failure to understand the country they live in outside its elite bubbles, its cities, its college-educated campuses,” explained Fox contributor Ari Fleischer.
And they declared the primary over.
“He's the nominee. Get over it. He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination,” Fox contributor Newt Gingrich told the host who once flew him on a private jet to meet Trump and audition as vice president. Tomi Lahren, an OutKick host and self-described “big supporter of Ron DeSantis,” offered that following Trump’s “decisive victory, … it is time for Republicans to galvanize behind Donald Trump.”
They are probably right that the GOP primary is coming to an end sooner rather than later. But last night’s caucuses revealed that Trump hasn’t entirely closed the sale with the voters he will need to win the general election. And rather than explain why that might be the case, his man at Fox is trying to bring those recalcitrant Republicans back into the fold by instead focusing their attention on the perfidious Democrats. Hannity’s job is to help Republicans win elections, and last night’s results show that his efforts for 2024 are just getting started.
