The Iowa State Fair
‘Donnnaaallldd!!! Donnnaaaaallldd!!!’ Donald Trump was surrounded by fans. He looked happy. He took a bite out of a pork chop on a stick — eating one is a campaign ritual for every politician visiting the Iowa State Fair — and raised his arm in salute. ‘We love you,’ a woman shouted. Someone else yelled: ‘Save our country! Save America!’ No other Republican candidate visiting the fair — no candidate from either party — has generated such crowds and such excitement. ‘I touched him,’ said one woman running over to her friends. ‘I got a selfie.’ Nothing of substance was being discussed in the eye of this storm, marked by Trump’s red baseball cap embroidered with the words ‘Make America Great Again’. This was as much like the visit of a TV celebrity — which Trump is — as that of a politician running for office. But on the fringe of the crowd, a knot of men were having a debate. ‘I’m a Trump supporter,’ said 68-year-old John Wood, bow-legged in his shorts. ‘I spent 27 months in Vietnam and I hate what’s goin’ on in this country… he says things that maybe aren’t popular but we’ve been in trouble for a long time by tryin’ to be politically correct. We need to say: that’s the way it is, plain and simple.’ I asked the group what they liked most about Trump’s platform. ‘The wall,’ said one: ‘Keep out the Mexicans and al-Qaeda.’ The Donald, as the billionaire property magnate is known, had descended in a helicopter a couple of hours earlier. Two dozen supporters were waiting to see him land. I asked them about the incendiary language he used about women and about immigrants. After the Republican primary debate, Mr Trump famously declared that his questioner, Fox’s Megyn Kelly, had ‘blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her, wherever’.
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