Trump Receives a Warm Embrace in Frigid Iowa

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

83% : "I love Trump -- his tenacity and his fearlessness, his fierceness," Tenney, a missionary and an international evangelist, told me.
74% : "Iowa loves Trump.
70% : "The next day, Trump took the stage in Indianola, where a packed room had waited expectantly for hours; he stood in his white-and-gold hat, staring out at the crowd for the duration of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." He surveyed the audience: "We have so much time today.
67% : He pitched a revival of faith and a revival of Trump.
67% : "Donald Trump, Jr., took the stage.
65% : I stood with Dean, a truck driver in his sixties who was going to caucus for the first time in his life -- for Trump.
64% : Every member of the House Republican leadership is backing Trump, and he has endorsements from nearly a hundred House members and nineteen senators.
64% : Trump had done an impromptu meet and greet, and signed her captain hat.
62% : "They're trying to get you set up here: 'Donald Trump is winning by seven thousand four hundred and sixty-two points; you should just stay home.'
61% : Well, and J.F.K., but that wasn't in my time.
58% : After a week in court, Trump was supposed to return to Iowa, to welcoming crowds at four enormous weekend rallies across the state, in advance of Monday's caucuses.
58% : "On Thursday morning, while Trump was in court in New York, Ben Carson stumped for him at Grace Baptist Church in Marion, Iowa, as part of the Team Trump Iowa Faith Tour.
58% : In December, a Wall Street Journal poll showed that Trump had the support of seventy-one per cent of rural Republican primary voters, compared with his fifty-nine-per-cent support over all.
57% : As we spoke, at 8 P.M. sharp, the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll dropped, showing Trump at forty-eight points, with Haley in second place.
55% : On my way, I saw cars and trucks that had skidded off the road in the storm scattered throughout snowbanks, overturned and draped in caution tape.
55% : When the event dispersed, the Secret Service escorted Trump into a meeting room, and I finally saw him in the flesh.
54% : The pollster who conducted it said that the results reminded her of 2016, when Donald Trump led the final Iowa poll but Ted Cruz won the caucuses.
53% : "Adrian Robinson, in a red Trump hat over his dreadlocks, who'd stood to cheer during Carson's address, told me, "Trump was one of the first people who called out the deep state.
52% : The weather in Iowa was already not great, but people queued outside for six hours, then waited inside for three more for Trump to take the stage.
52% : bring Donald Trump back."
51% : ("They always bend the knee," Trump said after Representative Tom Emmer, of Minnesota, agreed to endorse him recently.)
51% : He praised Trump for a twenty-eight-billion-dollar farm bailout.
51% : Just before Trump came on, the "God Made Trump" video played.
49% : I was never who I am without Trump.
49% : God made Trump."
48% : Two people thought Trump had won.
48% : "That afternoon, Donald Trump, Jr., came to stump for his father at the Machine Shed, a restaurant in Urbandale, just outside Des Moines.
46% : "The system don't want him in there," he said, of Trump.
45% : Instead of feigning traditional godliness, Trump casts himself as a warrior for Christians.
44% : "Trump wants to dominate the caucus and say, 'It's over, nobody can beat me, I'm the nominee,' " he said.
43% : Robinson had voted for Barack Obama, and then for Trump.
43% : People can say what they want about Trump, but he has a bit of a Democrat in him.
42% : "No," he clarified, "God made Trump run.
41% : The winner of the Iowa caucuses is seldom the party's nominee in the general election, but, insofar as the contest is described as a weather vane, this year it matters a lot to Trump as the first official test of whether his people really want him back.
40% : On Wednesday night, Trump returned briefly to Iowa to take part in his customary counter-programming while the other G.O.P. candidates did the Party's official debate at Drake University across town.
40% : It's like Trump says, I'm not a Democrat or Republican, I'm commonsense."
40% : "God made Trump?" I asked.
39% : "My family was all behind Ted Cruz in 2016, and they've all come over to Trump in the end."
37% : Trump is the first one who's not their puppet."
37% : Soon after, Trump walked into the lobby, slightly rumpled, in a long black coat and a white shirt with a few buttons undone.
36% : He was teasing the only question that seemed to be sustaining the narrative tension for the droves of journalists and pollsters who had descended on the state: What if Trump didn't have it in the bag?
36% : Gary, a Trump caucus captain in a white-and-gold hat, told me that Trump is like "a doctor who saved your life but has bad bedside manners."
35% : On my way in, I ran into a guy who attended seemingly all caucus events to hand out red yarmulkes with the respective candidate's name emblazoned in gold -- he told me that if Trump wore one there would be no more antisemitism.
33% : Even New Hampshire's governor, Chris Sununu, an enthusiastic Haley endorser who's been campaigning with her, has said that he'd have no problem supporting Trump as the Republican nominee if he were a convicted felon.
33% : Indeed, at a rally the weekend before, Trump had told the crowd, "This is what being conservative, I think, is: they're people of common sense.
24% : Heading into the weekend, as Trump recorded his "Be there soon" video, the lingering uncertainty remained: should Trump be afraid that his voters aren't going to come out, or that his margin of victory is too narrow to appear decisive?
23% : Iowa's evangelical bloc, which usually stuck with traditional conservative candidates in the caucuses -- Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz -- has now assembled behind Trump.
18% : Donald Trump was having travel difficulties.
15% : (Trump called the results election fraud.)
10% : Carson framed the contest of the caucuses as the deep state against Donald Trump, "sort of like David and Goliath in the Bible."
2% : At recent events, Trump has been playing a trippy spiritual video, called "God Made Trump," which states "God gave us Trump," and Trump is "a shepherd to mankind.

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