I’ve been on the road and away from Takes From State 48 for a couple of weeks. Now, I’m back with a “Take From State 29.” That would be Iowa, where I started back when Mr. Carter was president. Buckle in for a long one. There’s a lot to say.
Fall is Iowa’s season. Harvest is underway. Leaves are turning. Nights are cool even after the summer of Climate Change. No, this isn’t a travelogue. So, I’ll pivot to Four Takeaways from the trek that included a smash mouth Big 10 football game.
Takeaway # 1 - The state I always associated with true “common sense” has gone scarily Trumpian Red.
Yes, Iowa always has been a conservative place when you get beyond the city limits. But now, full-throated, bat shit crazy Trump drones and clones are in control, as evidenced by the GOP brass who attended his Des Moines rally October 8th.
That means they regularly spew the authoritarian talking points of the unhinged former president. Sure, for a while now, Purple Iowa has looked like a fall maple leaf. This is bigger. Evidence of a foundational shift is piling up. Some examples:
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Ancient) bungled Judiciary Committee affairs during the Trump presidency. Now at 88, Grassley sees his re-election tied to supporting Trump’s democracy destruction. The Grassley who swept into the Senate in the Reagan landslide was a conservative but reasonable person. I knew plenty of Democrats, done with Democratic Senator John Culver, who crossed over to Grassley. They took a chance with a commonsense farmer from Northern Iowa. That Chuck Grassley is dead. The new one is a Trumpian menace.
From the Iowa Governor’s mansion, Republican “Covid Kim” Reynolds’ management of the pandemic lines up with the Trumpian dismissal of science. She’s so aggressively blocked mask and vaccine mandates that her detractors call her the “Kim Reaper.” 6,700 Iowans are dead and the Delta variant ran hot through the summer.
The Iowa Legislature acts more like the CRAZY Arizonans under our Copper Dome than what Iowans have expected for years. They’ve parroted White Supremacist talking points as if Congressman Steve King was still around. And, like Arizona, they’re messing with voting rights.
Takeaway # 2 - Make no mistake, if Trump can destroy decades of Iowan common sense, he can win the White House again.
His Des Moines rally previewed the 2024 campaign as the seditious former president railed wackily for an hour and 43 minutes. (By the way, Arizona’s Trump puppet Kari Lake, who grew up in Iowa, was in attendance.) His lies, delivered as the Iowa political brain trust nodded their approval, don’t stand up under fact checks.
His energized crowd, what can only be called a Trumpian cult, predicted “civil war.” The phrase began to trend on Twitter. Scary.
Even scarier are the polls. Trump’s popularity is rocketing among Iowa Republicans, meaning among 2024 voters. Some blame Biden’s stumbles with COVID. Others attribute it to a rural-urban divide.
My take, completely based on my drive through cornfields sprouting Trump signs: this is City vs. Country. In Iowa where just about everything connects to farming, Country rules.
Takeaway # 3 - City and Country can unite in the forever Blue outpost of Iowa City. As long as they’re together in Kinnick Stadium.
Well, the Blue was more evident outside the stadium. Inside, watching from my 18-inch seat with 65,000 fired up fans, it felt like full immersion in a Red State Thunderdome. Which should make no sense. This university boasts world class everything. A monument to science and liberal thinking should clearly understand that a United States of Trump is a dangerous place for America.
Except, I didn’t get that vibe. I saw something different, beginning with the words of Nile Kinnick himself, or at least the way they were framed.
Kinnick Stadium is named for Iowa’s war hero and Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick. On the scoreboard before each game, the Hawkeye faithful watch his 1939 acceptance speech. He used the Heisman ceremony to say he’d take football field over a battlefield any day. When WWII came, Kinnick chose a Navy uniform, and died in service to a cause greater than football.
But what followed seem to co-opt Kinnick’s act of patriotism and courage. It became a launchpad for an afternoon of messaging designed to unite Iowans in a simplistic Red, White and Blue version of themselves. White, rural, traditional. It felt Trumpian.
Those messages were delivered by the stadium entertainment team at every extended stop of play. They showcased muscular propaganda that matched the physicality of the game itself. It was done smartly, the flag hugging cloaked in the cover of Iowa’s farm town and family sensibilities. Here’s what I saw:
After the Kinnick newsreel came the pregame shock and awe of an Air Force flyover. Doesn’t Trump love a good flyover?
Later, the crowd celebrated an appearance by the commanders of the USS Iowa nuclear submarine. Doesn’t Trump love a strong military.
Since this was “America Needs Farmers” weekend, Hawkeye and former NFL great Marshall Yamda touted the importance of the American (Iowa) farmer, surrounded by family, cornfields, and tractors. Never mind that the very existence of the small family farm is in dispute as Big Ag takes over food production. Doesn’t Trump believe he’s the best president farmers ever had?
The black and gold clad crowd at Kinnick reveled in each moment. 90 miles west in Des Moines, the MAGA Red Cult joined in, watching the FOX game broadcast on big screens, cheering their Hawkeyes while they waited for the Great Liar to take the podium. In the stadium and at the State Fairgrounds, the message seemed to say, “in Trump and Hawkeyes we trust.”
As we left the game in a crowd pumped with winner’s energy, I wondered if my read of the stadium show was off-base.
Really, wasn’t this just football and a celebration of a crazy proud state? Is it even possible that the alums and boosters of a liberal Big 10 University got so lost in their pride they just went along with the sappy patriotic groupthink inside Kinnick? Over in Des Moines, how did the leadership class lose their grip and get in lockstep with a narcissistic failed businessman and his adoring MAGA cult? They have to know The Truth, right?
Well, maybe not, because The Truth is delivered less and less by Iowans, who know their fellow Iowans. Instead, it’s coming from FOX News, and NewsMax, and talk radio, Twitter, and Facebook, the media echo chambers that reinforce our own biases instead of challenging us with facts and truth. Those entities, I fear, are crowding out local voices because those local voices are drying up.
Takeaway # 4 - The loss of local voices in the news media leaves Iowans without the filters needed to find The Truth and to discern the difference between authentic Iowa pride and the sappy and sentimental “patriotism” that feeds the Trump machine.
Lots of local newspapers have closed in a state that had many and that Iowans read cover-to-cover. Iowa lost 17% of its dailies over the last few years and circulation has dropped 14% according to a University of North Carolina study of so-called “news deserts.” Local ownership of print and broadcast media is also pretty much gone, replaced by mega media companies like Sinclair, Tegna, Nexstar, and Gray. They have no stake in a community beyond counting the ad dollars.
Atlantic writer Elaine Godfrey captured the consequences perfectly in her article on the demise of the Burlington Hawk Eye, swallowed by a familiar face to Arizonans, Gannett. Elaine is an Iowa State grad who understands the through line from newspaper to community to politics to leadership to democracy. She wrote one of the most insightful/incite-ful paragraphs on the phenomena I’ve read to date:
“In the absence of local coverage, all news becomes national news: Instead of reading about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tom Courtney, a Democrat and four-term former state senator from Burlington, made more than 10,000 phone calls to voters during his 2020 run for office. In those calls, he heard something he never had before: ‘People that live in small-town rural Iowa [said] they wouldn’t vote for me or any Democrat because I’m in the same party as AOC,’ Courtney told me. ‘Where did they get that? Not local news!’ Courtney lost in November.”
How much does quality local news matter in saving America from another four to eight years of Trump? A lot.
When I covered Cedar Rapids and Waterloo City Halls back in the mid 1970’s, we were regularly reminded by our colleague from the Des Moines Register that Tricky Dick Nixon read his newspaper daily. The Register, President Nixon believed, reflected a truer America than the one filtered through the New York-Washington media bubble. Local, Des Moines local, was important to him.
Nixon counted on everyday Iowans, educated in some of best public schools anywhere, hard-working people who chose to live in the open spaces in the middle of the country, to sort out the chaos. Eventually, they joined the rest of America and pushed him out. Common sense, indeed.
Well, in 2021 the chaos has overtaken Iowa as it did Nixon. Only this time, there are no speed bumps…
…in a Chuck Grassley Congress, a white nationalist legislature, and a governor willing to let her neighbors die. No locally owned Burlington Hawk Eye and Des Moines Register. No Iowan sense of what’s real and right. No institutions to get control of a man who’s angling to become America’s il Duce.
Like I said, scary. So, we need some hope.
I’ll close with a plug for Iowa Watch, the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism. This non-profit is stepping in where the big local publications, TV, and radio used to go, delivering quality journalism on the big issues that face Iowa and the rest of us. An example, their recently published series on small town Iowa reported by former Cedar Rapids Gazette editor and former Iowa Watch Executive Director/Editor Lyle Muller.
We need Iowa Watch. And Iowa Watch needs our financial support to deliver the quality work that can fix what ails Iowa and the rest of America.
The vaccine to end the Trumpdemic is factual, relatable journalism aimed at improving our lives and rooted in the communities where local journalists live and work.
Please, find a few bucks for Iowa Watch, and Truth over Trumpism.