Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.
The autopsy
Belatedly, I listened to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast released on November 28. I say “belatedly” because, since the election, a new “breaking news” story surfaces every day, usually one more shocking than the day before. It has been doubly true in the week since Thanksgiving.
News not available to the Down Ballot panelists at the time of their forum is the full lineup of nominees President-elect Donald Trump has chosen for his cabinet. It is each day’s big news story. Matt Gaetz (“a” before “e” except after “c”) is already old news, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth (I hope I never have to learn to spell or pronounce that name) seems to be the worst of the bad boys.
Hegseth has met with U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, who was first elected from Iowa in 2014. As per the New York Times, Ernst is the “pivotal” vote standing between Hegseth and The Pentagon. NOTUS reported that Ernst has interest in becoming the next U.S. Secretary of Defense in Trump’s administration, and would be easier to confirm than Hegseth. He has expressed doubts about women serving in combat roles. Ernst—a combat veteran who served in Iraq—has called for a “thorough vetting,” but more recently said she would support Hegseth’s “confirmation process.”
Some have speculated that Trump is souring on the ill-vetted Hegseth and may appoint Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to lead the Pentagon. The shoes Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin leaves behind are huge, man size. He is a four-star general, a West Point grad with over 40 years of military service — and no womanizing or drunkenness appears in his service record.
So far, so bad. But others have equally weak credentials or alarming histories. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for health and human services. Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Oz. Matt Whitaker for U.S. ambassador to NATO. Stephen Miller as deputy chief of policy in the White House. Elon Musk as co-chair of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” The retired professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon as education secretary, no less, where she’ll oversee the nationwide retreat from public education.
Recently, I read a book about Stephen Miller entitled Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda―An Examination of Radicalization and Right-Wing Extremism. The author, Jean Guerrero, is an Emmy-winning investigative reporter for KPBS in San Diego and the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir. The title says it all. Miller appears to be a dangerous person, and evil.
On December 4, a Florida sheriff named Chad Chronister withdrew from consideration as DEA Secretary, saying there was “more work to be done for the citizens” of his county. More nominees need to rethink their qualifications in light of the gravity of these jobs.
In the news, I saw a picture of Iowa’s 91-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley, slated again to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s the U.S. Senate, not the New Hartford Senior Center. In the pic, he was chatting with Trump sweetheart Pam Bondi of Florida who, no doubt, will traumatize the anti-MAGA crowd with a swiftness we can only wish Attorney General Merrick Garland could have mustered.
Speaking of Grassley, he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980, defeating Democratic incumbent John Culver (Chet’s father), the great liberal statesman and friend of the Kennedys and Tom Harkin. Culver was a Harvard Law grad and Marine Corps Captain who served one term in the Senate after ten years in the U.S. House of Representatives. That year, Grassley won 53.5 percent of the 1,772,983 votes, about a hundred thousand more ballots cast than in Iowa’s 2024 general election.
In he first run for Congress in 1974, Grassley narrowly defeated the young attorney Stephen Rapp, a rising star. Rapp is a Harvard graduate with his law degree from Drake. His Wikipedia entry indicates that Rapp went on from Iowa to an illustrious career putting really bad people in prison. He would have been a brilliant attorney under Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Iowa missed a great opportunity.
In an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 minutes about ongoing war crimes investigations on Syria, Rapp stated that there was more incriminating evidence against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad “than we had against the Nazis at Nuremberg” due to the existence of official documents and photographs that were smuggled out of the country.
I’ve likened the prospective Trump Cabinet to the Keystone Kops. Perhaps no one alive (except Chuck, of course) understands that reference, but it still fits. Maybe a crew of comics trying to navigate a mega yacht would be closer to the truth, like turning the QE2 over to the Saturday Night Live troupe with their crazy uncle at the helm. Easy to joke about, except the whole world is at stake, and icebergs are in the water. I honestly expect a full collapse of our government.
But back to the podcast
Dave Busiek, a retired station manager at KCCI, moderated this post-election discussion among journalists Bob Leonard of Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Doug Burns of The Iowa Mercury, Laura Belin of Bleeding Heartland and her Substack newsletter about Iowa politics, and Dr. Kedron Bardwell, a Simpson College political science professor. A small audience gathered in the John C. Culver Public Policy Center in Indianola to watch the podcast recording and ask a few questions. The perspectives were varied and interesting.
There have been numerous election autopsies, and being a glutton for that kind of thing, I take in much of it. I read that MSNBC viewership is down since Mr. and Mrs. Morning Joe showed up at the Mar-a-Lago Club. Possibly there to examine some classified documents? In contrast, Fox News viewership is up. Makes sense, galling as that is.
Bardwell said the issues were the economy, inflation, and Immigration, and that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris had “too short a runway,” meaning too little time to campaign.
My memory has it that, in 2020, Joe said he wanted to be a bridge to the future, not a highway, and would not seek a second term. As it turned out he thought he was a highway and got himself positioned in the first primary on February 3 in South Carolina where the skids were greased for him.
One panelist said Joe was arrogant. I love Joe so won’t go there, but hindsight is 20-20. I am 100 percent in favor of him pardoning Hunter though. As a father about Joe’s age, the image of Trump’s evil jailer turning the thumb screws down on his kid’s fingers makes the president’s decision a no brainer for me. Besides, I caucused for Elizabeth Warren in 2020, where Pete Buttigieg was the runaway choice in our north-side Ankeny caucus. That seems a lifetime ago. I’ll have to thumb through my Tarot cards to see who will replace Buttigieg in transportation. Wasn’t Ernst’s Army job in transportation?
Opinions differ about whether Harris would have been selected in an “open primary,” had Biden decided not to run for a second term. One panelist said she wouldn’t have won the nomination. Another reported that a Cook Political Report said the country was ready for a Black woman, so “yes” she would have won. Personally, I thought she was great. I could watch reruns of the Harris-Trump debate a hundred times. The election should have been held the next day.
I’ve said elsewhere one big mistake Biden made was choosing Harris for vice president. She should have been the attorney general. Did you see how she went after U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a senator in 2018? A brilliant prosecutor, she knew how to put bad guys behind bars, swiftly.
Garland would have been a great vice president. Maybe a great Supreme Court justice, which brings us back to the guileful Chuck Grassley. His allegiance to the GOP should never be questioned. Grassley was on television recently talking up the virtues of Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for F.B.I. director.
A few more highlights from the podcast:
Moderator Busiek noted that in 2020, Donald Trump carried Iowa over Joe Biden by approximately 53 to 45 percent. This year, he widened his margin of victory, getting nearly 56 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43. I’d like to ask our panelists, what happened in Iowa over the past four years that convinced more Iowans to support Trump over Harris?
Busiek. And I think that is just a huge change (Iowa becoming increasingly conservative) and it wasn’t a fluke. I mean, I guess we’ll find out if it outlasts Donald Trump, but we’ve now had three elections of seeing that (increasingly conservative) and I didn’t expect to see that 10 years ago. Doug Burns, you’re from sort of Northwest Iowa.
Doug Burns. Close enough in Carroll, which is very ruby red, and I don’t know what the ballot margin was for Trump in Carroll County. I looked up before we went on here that Harris won only five counties in Iowa — Polk, Story, Black Hawk, Lynn, and Johnson. She got 68 percent in Johnson County, but the other margins were in the range of 49% to 55%.
Trump carried the other 94 counties, said Burns. His vote total was north of 80 percent in some of those ruby-red Northwest Iowa counties.
Moderator. What’s going on up there?
Well, said Burns, there’s a woman who has a company in Carroll that’s called the Classroom Clinic, and she works around the state in high schools, actually K-12, and works with people who have mental health issues and is able to do telehealth services. And I did an interview with her the other day. She grew up on a farm near Manning, and she’s actually progressive and would have been somebody.
I didn’t ask her how she voted, but I would assume she would have been in the in the Harris camp, and she said something very profound. “There’s two economies,” she said. There’s the rural Iowa economy, and then there’s the urban-suburban economy.
So as I drive down here from Carroll, Doug Burns said, I came through Des Moines, I see this spectacular growth in areas like Grimes, Waukee, Bondurant. You see all this growth in the Iowa City, Cedar Rapids corridor, and then the part of the state that I live in, we’re being depleted. And so people where I’m from really, really feel left behind.
The Carroll woman’s comment is reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “The Other America” in 1967 at Stanford University where he addressed race, poverty and economic justice. Presidential candidate John Edwards, who later became John Kerry’s running mate, delivered an important speech on the topic. Speaking to an audience at a Des Moines community center on December 29, 2003 (shortly before the 2004 Iowa caucuses), Edwards said “Under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one.”
We live in Two Americas, one for the wealthy and powerful and one for everyone else.
One that lives by the paycheck calendar; another that never has to look at the calendar before writing a check. One that’s afraid it won’t be able to leave its children a better life; another whose children are already set for life. One America—middle-class America—long forgotten by Washington.
Another America—narrow-interest America—whose every wish is Washington’s command.
But we can build One America, a place where everyone has a fair shot at the American Dream—the right to succeed on the strength of your own merits—and the responsibility to help others to do the same. Nobody gets to pull the ladder up behind them once they’ve gotten to the top, and everybody has a chance to make the climb.
It’s a simple principle of fairness and opportunity, first and always, even in a complex world.
John Edwards, published in the journal of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequities, first delivered December 29, 2003 in Des Moines.
Thirteen years ago, Stephen Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor, wrote an article for the Atlantic entitled “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life.” Bloom’s subtitle was, “Thoughts from a university professor on the Iowa hamlets that will shape the contours of the GOP contest.” His reflections were similar to the woman Doug Burns told about. Bloom’s two Iowa’s were counties west of Des Moines, the “conservatives” and the counties east the “liberals,” prone to vote blue. Truer in 2011 than now.
Bloom’s bluntness raised the hackles of Iowa lifers, some of whom resented a Jewish professor telling them about Iowa. Bloom’s further mistake was citing Barack Obama’s observation about the Midwest:
Speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said, “Like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Barack Obama, circa 2008
Two Iowas? Yes, but the question is why has the middle class jumped on Trump’s bus?
One answer. I had a Facebook friend, a smart man in the radio talk-show business out of northwest Iowa. The shift to the right started years ago, he told me, when the local meatpacking plant changed hands and dumped the union. The new owners replaced people making a living wage with foreign-born workers — many, no doubt, “illegal,” to use the vernacular. And, Democrats sat on their hands and voters’ antipathy spread like a bad cold.
My theory
I live in a Des Moines suburb where there are pockets of housing that exceed $750K occupied by wealthy families who do business in Iowa — like corporate agriculture, Caseys, Monsanto, Pioneer (can’t remember current name), or financial institutions, real estate, development and construction, etc.
Very few of these folks in this group voted blue, and none are suffering from the economy (great for them), inflation, a migrant invasion, or trans-girls competing in their private school’s sports, supposedly the big issues in Iowa. They supported Trump because he delivers what they want: deregulation, tax cuts, a conservative court, and privatization of everything. These “values” percolate into the company’s break rooms and become the gospel carried to the ballot box, and celebrated on Sundays in many local “prosperity-themed” megachurches. That’s why there were dozens of Trump signs on the streets in Ankeny.
The State House races in Ankeny tell a somewhat different story. In 2022, each of the two Ankeny House districts sent a Democrat to the legislature, by single digit margins. In 2024, one incumbent (Heather Matson) was re-elected by a similarly narrow margin. Some voters must have chosen the Democrat for state House while choosing Trump for the White House.
The other Democrat in House district, local public school teacher Molly Buck, lost by a small margin to a former local school board president. The ex-board member blanketed MSNBC with dark ads claiming the incumbent Democrat had voted to ban gas cook stoves, require EVs, and governmental monitoring of every household’s thermostat. All BS, of course, and I’m unsure why he advertised on MSNBC, but I see one district teacher’s post on the candidate’s Facebook page with an attaboy, saying she’d sent his promo page to 26 Facebook friends.
Buck received 2,866 more votes in 2024 than she did when she won the seat in 2022, but the Republican candidate Ryan Weldon received 3,133 more votes than Buck’s opponent did 2022, meaning he (or Trump) turned out more Republican-leaning voters.
The other half of my theory is that those Trump voters not in the “wealth caucus” are hoodwinked, like Moses’ people were in the desert. They had wandered for years lost before finding the promised land. The cavalcade had just walked through the Red Sea on dry land and still could not trust Moses long enough to avoid worshipping a golden calf, or (as per the 21st Century) an orange-faced MAGA man. When Moses returned from the Mount, he was so pissed at their infidelity, he broke the stone tablets. Should Thomas Jefferson, whose quill-scribed constitution should still be our sacred law, return from Mount Monticello, I know someone who’d be in for a huge butt kicking.
Panelist Robert Leonard: “And it’s time to rally, plan, and organize”
At the Down Ballot forum, panelist Robert Leonard, a former professor mentioned his essay entitled “Document the atrocities” first published in his Substack on November 23 and picked up by the Sunday Cedar Rapids Gazette. The “atrocities” he’s talking about are Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Leonard’s credentials are such that Iowans should listen up. He is an anthropologist and former radio reporter with bylines galore. He was on the Marion County Local Emergency Committee for many years. His writing can be found at Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture.
Now the worst-case scenario, says Leonard. The ramifications of this along the timescale Trump desires will stress the government’s resources, cost a great deal, create havoc in labor markets, and cause diplomatic rifts worldwide. Families will be split, houses and apartments abandoned, and the undocumented driven underground. Communities will be devastated. Positive relationships that have been built over decades between the undocumented and local law enforcement will be destroyed. Trump and the MAGA media will blame all of this on the undocumented and the Biden administration. …
Trump is an authoritarian, wants to deport millions of people, calls undocumented people vermin, scum, animals, and other dehumanizing terms, is filling administrative posts with MAGA loyalists, and will replace military leaders who won’t do his bidding, damned the illegality. If his plans work, he will have a MAGA armed forces.
Leonard says, “And it’s time to rally, plan, and organize with possibly the greatest allies of the undocumented–a legion of sympathetic young people on TikTok, Instagram, or whatever social media platform they prefer. Democrats raised a billion dollars quickly for the last presidential campaign. Let’s resource these groups and young people.”
Leonard warns that deputized militias could come knocking on doors, even in Iowa, and load people in buses bound for detention centers. He fears violence.
In a recorded interview broadcast on “Meet the Press” on December 8, Trump said he’d start deportation with criminals, namely Venezuelan gangs. I’m not sure the extent of infiltration of Latin American gangs. Trump invented a story about gangs in Denver that the city’s mayor refuted as untrue. But if these gangs are as organized in U.S. cities as in Honduras, for example, there will be violence.
Gordon Abner, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas-Austin, similarly argued that in some respects, American institutions have already begun to accede to Trump. A recent New York Times column by Thomas B. Edsall quoted Abner as saying,
I don’t think Trump has to change as many laws, rules, and regulations as people think. Corporations, universities, and nonprofits are already getting rid of D.E.I. without Trump having to do anything other than use his oratory skills. Many leaders either agree with his messaging and/or believe their clients and donors agree. Universities are already weakening their tenure policies, and accreditation standards require that universities adhere to the law, so if states or the federal government pass laws and regulations championed by Trump, accreditation would only have to mirror it.
In fact, Abner contended,
The biggest open secret is that Trump’s message genuinely resonates with people, and Democrats need to accept that and unpack it without denigrating those who support his message, which is not working. So, to the extent that liberalism is undermined, it is not just because of Trump. It is because many Americans want autocratic leadership or fear standing up to an authoritarian leader, which is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe we are not as exceptional as we think.
What is most concerning about Trump, Abner told Edsall, is not that he will do things that are illegal, because what does illegal mean at this point? What is most concerning is that he will extend his power lawfully, and when he publicly bullies and intimidates everyday American citizens and leaders of institutions, there will not be enough good people in positions of power to say that it is wrong and profoundly un-American.
“From what we know so far, it appears that Abner may be right,” Edsall concluded.
I strongly recommend reading Edsall’s essay, as well as Leonard’s admonition “to rally, plan, and organize.” The wheel always turns, but it needs a push.
Top photo by Bruce Alan Bennett from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City in 2015 is available via Shutterstock.