The stars over a dark Trump night in Iowa | Will Bunch Newsletter

I usually write this part of the newsletter first, but this week I saved it for last, hoping against hope that our Philadelphia Eagles would rediscover their inner ... something, and I’d have a joyous bounce-back playoff win to crow about. Instead, Monday night’s loss was three hours I will never get back, with tackling by the Birds that looked like a peewee-league game. The only good news is that the Philadelphia Union return one month from Saturday.

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Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”

— the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his final speech on April 3, 1968, as quoted Monday in historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter

On a frigid night when the American hellscape that is the 2024 presidential election nearly froze over, in the most warped perversion imaginable of what would have been King’s 95th birthday, Donald Trump’s march toward a would-be dictatorship planted a giant boot-print in the deep Iowa snowdrifts.

When the swirling snows finally settled before midnight on Monday, Trump and his openly authoritarian drive to return to the White House as a revenge-minded 47th president captured 51% of the caucus-goers against his divided and often inept rivals, signaling that the 2024 primary season is all but over as soon as it started.

The record deep freeze across the Hawkeye State and most of the Lower 48 — with windchills worse than 30-below in some rural outposts — was just the latest foreboding that the battle for the survival of America democracy has ripped a giant tear in the cosmos, with earthquakes from the Sea of Japan to Oklahoma City, molten lava spewing from the earth under Iceland, and Biblical flooding taking place across parts of the United States. Scientists might note that the polar vortex causing America’s epic cold snap isn’t a message from the angry gods but merely the latest climate catastrophe, as global warming weakens the Gulf Stream, but you’d never hear this from a field of GOP candidates soaked to the skin in fossil fuels and denial.

Flip on your TV, and you’ll hear a lot of chatter over the battle for second place in Iowa, as if that mattered. The networks have too much invested in fancy touchscreens and dramatic “Campaign ‘24″ overtures to tell you the truth — that caucuses and primaries are for functioning political parties, and the GOP has become a cult. The fact that judges have already ruled the all-but-certain 2024 Republican nominee is a fraudster and a rapist even before his 91 felony charges go before a jury means nothing to tens of millions of Americans for whom Trump’s vows to smite their mutual enemies — in the media and on college campuses and Capitol Hill — are a feature, not a bug.

At one Trump Iowa rally this past weekend, a grey-haired backer in a red MAGA hat told a social-media interviewer that he’d love to see repeal of what he called “the Roosevelt law,” meaning the 22nd Amendment that limits Trump to only one more term. He added: “This country needs a dictator. I hate to say it, but this is the truth.”

Yet the TV talking heads still toil to explain Trump’s appeal after Jan. 6 and the two impeachments and the four separate criminal cases. The latest theory is that these voters are convinced they had it better during the 45th presidency, but their economic nostalgia and false memories are just one part of that. They recall it as better because the man in the White House shared their visions of patriarchy and white privilege, as well as of the same educated, left-leaning foes.

While the nattering nabobs were expressing shock over Trump’s Hitler plagiarism when he declared immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, Iowa’s so-called evangelicals were voicing approval. A new CBS News/YouGov poll found that 81% of Republicans agree with Trump’s anti-migrant tirade (and 47% of all Americans, almost identical to Trump’s percentage of the vote in 2016 and 2020). The same survey found about two-thirds of GOP voters think efforts to promote racial diversity are “going too far,” and a majority back Trump’s schemes to prosecute his political enemies.

“You get the feeling right now in Iowa that we are sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” veteran Iowa Republican lawyer Doug Gross told the New York Times. But maybe it’s time to acknowledge that many of these voters are wide awake and know exactly what they are doing. We don’t even have to wait until January 2025 to see the moral rot of Trump policies. Just look at Gov. Greg Abbott in Trump-fried Texas, where this weekend Abbott’s tin soldiers along the Rio Grande blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from intervening as three migrants fatally drowned.

As I noted in this space last week, it’s a national travesty that Iowa Republicans laid down this marker for white supremacy on the federal holiday honoring King. What should have been a 24-hour conversation about completing King’s dream for an America with justice and equality for all was rudely interrupted by this backlash. That’s why I was grateful for Richardson’s citation of one of the civil rights leader’s less famous quotes, in which he talked about what it was like to fight oppression in the 1960s, when the challenges facing America were just as great as they are today.

Just as in 1968, there are bright stars illuminating our dark, sub-zero night. We just lost one right there in Iowa — not that you heard about it this weekend from the gun-lobby-addled Republicans seeking the White House. Dan Marburger was the beloved principal of Perry High School when a gunman went on a shooting spree earlier this month. Rather than run away, he tried to distract or calm down the shooter — and sustained the wounds that later killed him. His selfless sacrifice no doubt saved the lives of some of his young students.

Most of us will never be called upon for such an act of courage. But we can all do something to save American democracy, rather than fleeing into the void. The poll numbers and the pro-dictator quotes can be demoralizing, yet they don’t represent the majority of U.S. citizens. On our darkest night, let’s not forget there are millions of potential stars that could set the American sky ablaze.

Question: Why is the media more interested in the Iowa caucus than in what’s happening in Texas where the Texas National Guard has been instructed by the governor to deny federal forces access to the border? While refugees drown in the background? — Via John Starbuck (@JCStarbuck3) on X/Twitter

Answer: John, the networks had way too much money and human capital invested in Iowa not to pretend that Trump’s landslide caucus victory was a big deal, even if it was just a predictable coronation by an authoritarian cult. But immigration and the border crisis on the Rio Grande is bound to become a much bigger story, for two reasons. First, Texas’s actions are the biggest pushback to federal authority since the Deep South’s massive resistance to school integration in the 1950s and ‘60s, and expect the Biden administration to fight this all the way. Also, last night’s entry polls in Iowa showed that immigration is the No. 1 issue for Donald Trump’s MAGA voters, and the spotlight on the GOP frontrunner’s brutal policies will need to grow, as Eagle Pass becomes today’s Fort Sumter.

Last week’s question about the future of embattled Eagles coach Nick Sirianni proved as timely as I feared, as the Birds completed their all-time collapse in Tampa Bay. Actually, maybe I should have waited a week, because before the playoff debacle, most readers were still willing to cut Sirianni some slack, given that he’d led the the team to the Super Bowl just a year ago. Fletcher McClellan predicted Sirianni “will not be fired but will be forced to hire all new assistants, except [offensive line coach Jeff] Stoutland and the special teams coach. Whether he goes along with this is an open question.” Others had similar solutions, but Dennis Reed is ready to pull the plug, writing “please replace with a leader of men.”

📮This week’s question: The U.S.-Mexico border is a mess, spotlighted by this weekend’s drowning of a migrant woman and her two children. But Capitol Hill seems hopelessly gridlocked. What should the U.S. government be doing to control the flood of refugees while addressing a growing humanitarian crisis?

There are nearly 332 million Americans, and it’s hard to think of one who’s more despicable than Payton S. Gendron. If the name fails to ring a bell, he’s the then-18-year-old white supremacist who in 2022 wrote a racist manifesto endorsing the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” before murdering 10 African Americans in a shooting spree in a Buffalo supermarket. But if you believe that capital punishment is immoral — as most of the developed world does — then you believe even a figure as loathsome as Gendron should not be executed. President Joe Biden promised voters in 2020 that he’d do everything in his power to end the death penalty. So why did Biden’s Justice Department announce last week it will seek to have the Buffalo shooter (already sentenced to life in prison by New York State, but still facing federal charges) put to death?

Some campaign promises are ambiguous, but not this one. It was right there on Biden’s 2020 website — that as president he would seek legislation to end the federal death penalty and lean on states to follow that example. In the summer of the George Floyd protest marches, the candidate said even those convicted of the most outrageous crimes — presumably like the Buffalo mass murder — “should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole.” Since taking office in 2021, however, Biden has seen and occasionally joined a backlash against criminal-justice reform, and there’s been no serious legislative push to ban capital punishment. While no federal inmate has been executed under Biden’s watch — compared to 13 under the zealously pro-death-penalty Donald Trump — the Justice Department under his attorney general, Merrick Garland, has fought on appeal to keep the death sentence in several high-profile cases. A true anti-death-penalty administration would not be pushing to execute Gendron, no matter how hideous his crime.

Biden’s flip-flop on the death penalty isn’t his only broken promise, although it may be his most blatant one. Most notably, he made the inhumanity of Trump’s border policies a campaign focal point, only to keep many of those policies in place when he became president. Biden’s failures on criminal-justice reform and immigration — along with the rise of America as the world’s biggest oil producer in a time of climate change — all share one thing: disrespect to the young, Black and brown voters who turned out in 2020 to put the Democrat over the top. Biden’s advisers who keep pushing their man to the right like it’s still 1983 ought to look at the calendar, and at which voters they’re driving away.

It’s hard to believe that 13 years have passed since the Arab Spring. By the end of 2011, the wave of revolutions that spread through a large swath of the Middle East were a big deal, even if the promise of the uprising would prove to be mostly unrealized. The Arab Spring is also remembered as the first time that social media, especially what was then still Twitter, drove social change, but on Jan. 16, 2011, the first wave in Tunisia was all but ignored by the U.S. media. I wrote: “Because while I found the events in Tunisia an irresistible story, the producers of our 24/7 cable news infrastructure here in the United States found it easy to resist; indeed, TV coverage of a revolution in the Arabic world, a major global story, was virtually non-existent here.” Check out what else I had to say in, “The revolution was not televised.”

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