Evelyn Reynolds

There haven’t been many good days for Ron DeSantis’s flailing presidential campaign lately, and news that the Florida governor has slumped to fifth place in a poll for the New Hampshire primary will hardly have lifted his spirits.Yet the biggest blow of the past week came from Florida’s once fiercely loyal Republican party, which appears to be souring on the idea of their man in the White House.The state party’s scrapping last weekend of a loyalty oath for candidates in its presidential primary next year was, on its face, an innocent move, declared by its sponsors to merely ensure voters could choose from all Republicans competing for the White House. Removing Donald Trump from Florida’s ballot because he would not pledge support for the eventual nominee would be undemocratic, they said.But there appears to be more behind the defiance than just giving the former president a leg up in a race he already leads by a substantial margin. The action, which the Republican Florida governor lobbied hard against, sends a clear signal to DeSantis that he no longer enjoys the unquestioned allegiance of the party in his own state, a potentially fatal position for a candidate seeking to convince the rest of the country he is best qualified for the presidency.“People are paying attention, and they notice when a candidate’s home state is balking,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.“One thing that DeSantis was correctly noted for was his iron grip on the Florida Republican party. They didn’t question his directives, the legislature passed bills they didn’t even have extensive hearings on because DeSantis submitted them, and he kept his people in line.“He had an iron grip, but the iron has rusted. This suggests, yet again, that DeSantis has lost not only prestige, but influence, which is what really matters in the pre-nomination battle.”Rumblings have circulated for months that some Florida Republicans have become “fatigued” with their second-term governor and his extremist agenda. Several voted in the most recent legislative session against a six-week abortion ban that passed anyway, while others have criticized his feud with Disney over transgender rights.The reversal of the loyalty oath requirement approved in May for the 19 March primary heralds a significant crystallization of that opposition.Before the vote, behind closed doors at the Florida Republican party’s statesman’s dinner at an Orlando hotel, one senior operative told NBC News it “would be viewed as a ‘fuck you’ to DeSantis” if it passed.After it did, another Republican source told the outlet: “DeSantis just got steamrollered in his own home.”It came at a critical stage for his presidential run, with DeSantis’s poll numbers continuing to collapse (he trails Trump for the Republican nomination by 50 points in a Quinnipiac survey, and has slipped to third place behind Trump and Nikki Haley in New York); and while his latest campaign reset, following the dismissal of more than a third of his staff and appointment of a new manager, struggles to gain a footing.“This is going to be a case study going forward for many years, just because you won an election in your state by a landslide, that does not mean that you are unstoppable at the national level,” Sabato said.“In fact, it may mean relatively little, even when it’s a mega-state like Florida. Was Ron DeSantis the candidate who won in a landslide in 2022, or is he the presidential candidate who’s slipping below the radar today? Well, he’s both of those things. And they aren’t contradictory.“Can he reverse it? Anybody can reverse anything given the right time and circumstances, but it sure doesn’t look that way. In all the polls I’ve seen he just keeps dropping, and pretty soon one of those other candidates, maybe it’s Nikki Haley, maybe somebody else, will end up going above him in the polls. Maybe it’s only a few points, but that’s all that’s needed to change the narrative.”Notably, the measure to reverse the loyalty oath was brought by the Republican state senator Joe Gruters, the former chair of the state party who has clashed with DeSantis over the Disney wrangle. In June, Gruters accused DeSantis of vetoing spending in his district as retribution for not supporting him.“The governor is clearly upset I endorsed Donald Trump for president, so he took it out on the people of Sarasota county,” he said in a statement at the time. “Simply because I support his political opponent, the governor chose to punish ordinary Floridians.”Gruters did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but told reporters after the Orlando vote that it was about fairness.“It’s not about the pledge. It’s about creating unnecessary roadblocks late in the game that makes it perceived that it’s anti-Trump,” he said, according to Politico.DeSantis, who skipped the Orlando humiliation for fundraising events in New York, will have the chance to try to win back the support of state Republicans at the party’s Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on 4 November.“The Florida GOP will remain neutral, but we will work to support the entire Republican team by helping give all the presidential candidates as many opportunities as possible to connect with Florida voters,” spokesperson Nathalie Medina told reporters.Before that, however, DeSantis must plot his strategy for the next Republican primary debate on 27 September in California, seen by many as another possible make-or-break moment for his campaign.“He’s had a lot of turnover in his management team, his campaign team, so we’ll see. A lot of us are watching whether that’s going to make a difference, particularly looking ahead to the next debate,” said Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida.“Will he continue to focus on policy, which is what a lot of people would prefer, or is he going to have to get into the bashing of Trump and his colleagues on the stage? I don’t think the payoff for him is good in bashing, it’s in identifying problems facing the country and talking about how he will deal with them.” More

A speaking tour from the son of the former US president Donald Trump has been delayed for a second time, with organisers blaming a “scheduling conflict”.Donald Trump Jr was scheduled to tour the country in July but it was postponed until September amid claims of visa trouble. Under the revised schedule, he was due to speak in Brisbane on Monday night, before events in Melbourne and Sydney this week.A spokesperson for Turning Point Australia, which organised the events, confirmed Trump Jr had obtained a visa for the September events but was not in the country.They confirmed the events had been rescheduled for a second time by Trump and had now been pushed back to December.“The event was rescheduled last week after we were informed of the scheduling conflict,” he said.
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The spokesperson also referred Guardian Australia to a YouTube clip by Tim Pool, the organiser of a Miami event on 6 October.Pool had said: “Donald Trump Jr is not going to be able to make it; he’s a very, very busy man.“Sorry to everybody who was really looking forward to seeing Donald Trump Jr. When these things come up, they come up.”Trump Jr is Donald Trump’s eldest son. He is the executive vice-president of the Trump organisation and has written two books on conservative politics.He is now scheduled to speak on 10 December in Sydney, 11 December on the Gold Coast and finish his tour in Melbourne on 12 December. More

A new Washington Post-ABC poll showing Joe Biden trailing his presidential predecessor Donald Trump by 10 percentage points was excoriated by leading political pollster Larry Sabato.Noting that the pollsters themselves cautioned that their survey was an outlier, Sabato – the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia – called the decision to release it “ridiculous”.“Ignore the Washington Post–ABC poll,” Sabato wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “How could you even publish a poll so absurd on its face? Will be a lingering embarrassment for you.” He added: “Just plain embarrassing – for them.”The New York Times’ chief political analyst Nate Cohn also criticized the poll that said Trump was ahead of Biden in the 2024 White House race.Referring to a Post-ABC poll in May that found Trump was up seven percentage points on Biden, which was similarly inconsistent with most polling, Cohn wrote on X: “It’s really really hard to release outlying poll results, so you’ve got to give credit to ABC/Post here, but I do have a fairly major quibble with ABC/Post here: if you release consecutive ‘outlying’ poll results … you don’t get to dismiss your results.“If it happens twice in a row in the same race, it’s clear that this is the result of some element of your approach, and you either need to decide you’re good with it and defend it or you need to go home.”The Washington Post acknowledged its survey was not in line with most polling, which generally finds that the Democratic incumbent Biden and the former Republican president Trump would be in a close, competitive race if they faced each other in the 2024 election.The Post wrote in its analysis: “The … poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat.“The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggests it is probably an outlier.”Despite the criticisms, at least one person stood by the poll results, with host Martha Raddatz saying on Sunday’s ABC This Week: “Whatever caveats, whether that is an outlier, that’s a tough one to spin.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response to Raddatz, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile said on the show: “It’s a tough one to spin, Martha, but I don’t believe Democrats should be sitting in a panic room.”Brazile went on to urge Democrats to “get out there, make your case to the American people”, who she said are angry due to rising living costs.Raddatz replied: “They are talking to the American people … and yet it is those pocketbook issues. The message may be out there, but they’re not feeling it.”Trump does hold commanding leads in national and key state polls regarding the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He enjoys that advantage despite facing more than 90 criminal charges across four separate indictments charging him with attempted subversion of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, retention of classified information after his presidency and hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. More

Pete Buttigieg, the US transport secretary and a military veteran, has criticized Donald Trump after a report that he sought to bar a severely wounded veteran from public appearances during his presidency.In an interview with the Atlantic, Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said Trump had been irritated after Luis Avila – who lost a leg and suffered brain damage after an IED attack in Afghanistan – sang at Milley’s 2019 welcome ceremony.“Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded,” Milley said Trump told him after the ceremony.Milley told the Atlantic that Trump said Avila should never appear in public again.On Sunday, Buttigieg – who was a lieutenant in the US navy reserve and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2014 – told CNN that Trump’s alleged order was “just the latest in a pattern of outrageous attacks [by Trump] on people who keep this country safe”.Military members wounded in combat, Buttigieg said, “deserve respect and a hell of a lot more than that from every American, and definitely from every American president”.Buttigieg also said: “The idea that an American president, the person to whom service members look as a commander in chief, the person who sets the tone for this entire country, could think that way or act that way or talk that way about anyone in uniform, and certainly about those who put their bodies on the line and sacrificed in ways that most Americans will never understand … I guess wounded veterans make president Trump feel uncomfortable.”Trump has a previously attacked members of the military. In 2020, the Atlantic reported that Trump had said the Aisne-Marne American cemetery – where more than 2,000 American military members who died in France are buried – was “filled with suckers”.The Atlantic reported that Trump had also said the more than 1,800 marines who died at Belleau Wood, the site of a key battle in the first world war, were “suckers” for getting killed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump denied the report, but he has a history of criticizing service members. In 2015 he referred to John McCain, the late US senator and navy veteran who spent nearly six years in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, as a “loser”.Trump added: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” More

The recently appointed director of Minnesota’s new marijuana regulatory agency, Erin Dupree, has resigned amid reports that she sold illegal cannabis products in the state.Dupree ran a business that sold products exceeding state limits on THC potency, owed money to former associates and accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in tax liens, Minnesota Public Radio reported.Loonacy Cannabis Co – the business Dupree founded in Apple Valley, Minnesota, last year – posted on its now-deactivated TikTok account about its edible products containing 10 milligrams of THC per serving and 150 milligrams per package, although state law only allows hemp-derived edibles to contain up to 5 milligrams of THC per serving and 50 milligrams per package, the Star Tribune reported.“I have never knowingly sold any noncompliant product, and when I became aware of them I removed the products from inventory,” Dupree said in a statement on Friday.“However, it has become clear that I have become a distraction that would stand in the way of the important work that needs to be done,” she added.Her role as the state’s first director of the office of cannabis management would have begun on 2 October.“One of the responsibilities, and I take it and the buck stops with me, is the appointments of literally thousands of people,” Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, said on Saturday. “In this case, the process did not work and we got this wrong.”Walz said in a Friday statement that the interim director of the cannabis office, Charlene Briner, would remain in an interim role, according to Minnesota Public Radio.Minnesota’s legalization of recreational marijuana went into effect in August, allowing people 21 and older to legally possess and grow their own marijuana for recreational purposes, subject to limits as the state establishes a legal cannabis industry in the coming months and years.The midwestern state is the 23rd in the country to legalize recreational marijuana. Surrounding states – including Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota – have not yet legalized it. More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined the calls for Bob Menendez to resign, after the Democratic US senator from New Jersey was charged with accepting gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and other gifts as bribes.Speaking on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez said the charges against Menendez were “extremely serious” and he should step down.A growing number of Democrats are calling for Menendez, who has represented New Jersey in the Senate since 2006, to resign.Menendez is accused of using his position to aid Egypt’s authoritarian government and pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.Over the weekend, John Fetterman became the first US Senate Democrat to suggest Menendez should quit, while a Democratic New Jersey congressman announced he would run against Menendez in next year’s primary election.Asked about Menendez on CBS’s Face the Nation, Ocasio-Cortez said:“The situation is quite unfortunate, but I do believe that it is in the best interest for Senator Menendez to resign in this moment.“Consistency matters. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. The details in this indictment are extremely serious. They involve the nature of not just his but all of our seats in Congress.”Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on Menendez come after she has previously called for a federal investigation into Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from wealthy rightwing donors.In August, ProPublica reported that Thomas had taken “at least 38” undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.Ocasio-Cortez had also previously called on Republican congressman George Santos to step down after he was indicted earlier this year for fraud, money laundering and other federal charges.Fetterman was another high-profile progressive who had called for Menendez’s resignation.“He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence under our system, but he is not entitled to continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations,” Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said in a statement on Saturday.“I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial.”Menendez denies the charges against him. In a statement on Friday he said: “I am not going anywhere.”But that has not stopped a burgeoning movement calling for his departure.Since then, Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, has joined the calls for Menendez to resign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMurphy would be in charge of appointing a replacement for Menendez if the senator leaves office. The replacement would be in office until a special election is held.Also on Sunday, Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic New Jersey congressman, repeated his previous call for Menendez to quit.“I called on him, given the gravity of the charges, to step aside,” Gottheimer told CNN.“Given how we’ve got elections coming up, there’s a lot of distractions; obviously giving the senator time to defend himself, I think what’s best is that he step aside and we focus on issues.”Menendez has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, in connection with alleged intervention on behalf of Egypt, and in allegedly pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.The indictment against Menendez alleged that he and his wife were paid a series of bribes by three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for corrupt acts. FBI agents investigating Menendez discovered “a lot of gold”, allegedly provided by businessman Fred Daibes, in the senator’s home, as well as about $500,000 in cash.Some of the money was “stuffed into envelopes and closets”, and some was “stuffed in the senator’s jacket pockets”, the FBI said.On Saturday, the Democratic New Jersey congressman Andy Kim said he would run against Menendez in the 2024 primary election.“After calls to resign, Senator Menendez said: ‘I am not going anywhere,’” Kim said in a statement.“As a result, I feel compelled to run against him. This is not something I expected to do, but I believe New Jersey deserves better. We cannot jeopardize the Senate or compromise our country’s integrity.“I believe it’s time we restore faith in our democracy, and that’s why I am stepping up and running for Senate.” More

Progressive political fundraising in America is facing a crisis, according to a leading Democratic grassroots donor organization, which warned this month that donations to progressive groups are “way down in 2023 across the board”.According to the Movement Voter Project, progressives have “a five-alarm fire going into 2024”. The organization’s director, Bill Wimsatt, said he was “pressing the panic button” because donor inaction is creating a movement-wide crisis.Wimsatt said there had been a peak for progressive causes around the time of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and amid campaigning to get Donald Trump out of office. “The sense of urgency and existential necessity has dissipated in people’s minds,” he said, “though the situation going into 2024 isn’t any less existential.”A report published by Middle Seat Consulting in July found that while the overall trend in small-donation giving is up since 2015, it is “significantly lower” in the first six months of 2023 than in the same quarters in recent years – and slowing. Cycle over cycle, fundraising is down 48%, it said.It noted that 2015–2022 had been an extraordinary time of political upheaval and uncertainty and Donald Trump motivated donors on the Democratic side. But with Trump out of office, grassroots donors on the left feel a sense of stability and there is reduced motivation to give.In 2020 progressive Democrats “busted our ass to win by 43,000 votes across three states”, Wimsatt says, referring to 2020 Democrat margins in Wisconsin (20,608), Arizona (10,357) and Georgia (11,799). “But if we don’t bust our ass again we’ll lose by 43,000.”The report also identified threats to digital fundraising from an increase in spam email across the fundraising industry, Facebook’s decision to deprioritize political content and other social media innovations making it harder to target potential donors. Phone companies, too, have improved filters to limit political texting.Economically, it added, the inflation crisis “likely had a big impact on the fundraising recession”, noting that “political giving is a luxury expense for most”.Wimsatt reasons that political fundraising is also cyclical. In the years where it had been “exhausted” – including 2010, 2014, 2016 – there had been a resulting rightwing surge. An addition $100m-$300m deployed to grassroots organizations for the rest of 2023, he wrote in the memo, would put progressive organization in a “place of strength” going into the election year.Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families party, says that while there are natural ebbs and flows in progressive fundraising, an alert about a paucity of donor interest in such a critical election cycle was appropriate.“The slowdown in small-dollar donations is real,” he said. “We’re coming off a high-water mark in 2020, when a lot of forces got into the action around Donald Trump and where he was taking the country. At the same time, the response to the George Floyd murder sparked the largest social movement in our country’s history.“With Biden as president, a lot of people have shifted their interests. We have to challenge that by communicating , as the rightwing have done from activist to donor, that this is a long-term political project and a reason to make year-round investments.”Raising fears of a second Trump term does not so far appear to be enough. “People heard about a threat to democracy in 2020 and version of it in 2022, so there is a level of fatigue,” Mitchell said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBreathless emails flooding inboxes may be good at squeezing small-dollar donors but not good at educating the base, getting the base into the fight or winning its trust, Mitchells says, “but progressives need to articulate the ‘why’ outside of ensuring a second Biden term”, he added.Ringing the Trump alarm may not be enough. “We think that’s one-third, and people should understand what the stakes are in putting the government in Maga control. Another third, he says, “is telling the story of what was won during this administration – the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill and American Rescue Plan”.The last, and possibly most important, “is the positive piece of what’s left on the agenda to do. We can’t expect that a fear-based narrative [will work] to build the united front we need. So there’s work to be done inspiring the base,” Mitchell says.If progressive organizations are successful at that, “I think we’ll see a surge of interest and a surge of resources, but it’s up to us to make that case.”Wimsatt, too, says effective messaging is key.“I try to tell a positive story,” he said. “We’re 13 years past the Tea Party, seven years since Trump’s first election, and it’ll take another five to 10 years to defeat them. 2024 is the battle royal and then we have a marathon after that. If we can hold on through that, we can have a progressive decade and nice things.” More

Wearing a shirt festooned with countless images of Donald Trump, Leverne Martin was looking cheerful for a man who had set off from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, at 9pm and driven through the night, arriving in Dubuque, Iowa, at 5.30am. When did he intend to sleep?“As soon as President Trump is back in the White House,” the 55-year-old handyman replied without missing a beat. “If we don’t get him back in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he belongs, we’re in a mess, man. That’s why I’m voting for President Trump. That’s why I drove nine hours.”On a grey, rainy day, Martin was near the head of a long and winding queue outside a cavernous conference centre overlooking the Mississippi River. Like so many fans in so many towns and cities over nearly a decade, an overwhelmingly white crowd had come to cheer on Trump, elected US president in 2016, beaten by Joe Biden in 2020 and clear frontrunnerfor the Republican nomination in 2024.What is striking about the traveling circus is not what has changed over that time but what has stayed the same. Hawkers still move up and down the line selling Trump calendars, keychains and other regalia with captions such as “Gun rights matter”, “Fight for Trump”, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president”, “No more bullshit”, “Trumpinator: I’ll be back” and “Fuck Biden and fuck you for voting for him”.Trump, 77, still puts on a show unlike anyone else in politics. Twentieth-century music from Abba, Celine Dion, Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston booms from loudspeakers. Video clips of allies such as the broadcaster Tucker Carlson and Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán receive cheers and those of foes such as Biden and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, elicit boos and jeers.The former reality TV star still enters to thunderous cheers and chants of “USA! USA!” People wave signs bearing his name and snap photos on their phones; one stood on a chair wearing an “I love Trump” T-shirt. Trump still plays the parts of demagogue, divider and standup comic, serving red meat to supporters who revel in shared grievance and the thrill of transgression.The slogan then is the slogan now: “Make America great again” (Maga), emblazoned on a blue backdrop to the stage where Trump spoke for 80 minutes. But for his supporters that phrase has taken on added meaning: Maga is now imbued with nostalgia for the Trump presidency when, as they perceive it, borders were strong and fuel prices were low.Mathew Willis, 41, wearing a “Let’s go Brandon” T-shirt alluding to an anti-Biden meme, said: “He showed what he can do for this country. The economy seemed the best that it had been, in my lifetime at least.“I just feel like he did a good job when he was in office. I want to see him do it again, especially after the last two and a half years of BS we’ve had. The economy’s in the toilet. Gas prices are up. We’re sending billions to other countries. We can’t even fix our own back yard. It’s sad.”The sentiment was echoed by Greg Erickson, 63, a retired insurance agent who blames the media for not giving the ex-president the credit he deserves. “I know to the deepest depths of my heart that Trump loves this country,” the army veteran said. “When he served four years as president, he was competent. Trump had inflation very low.“He had gas prices low and the highest employment rate for all minorities, for Blacks and women, which he doesn’t get credit for. He got rid of the bad guys; he killed two terrorists. He honored our military, which is very near and dear to me. He did a lot of great things for the country and that’s why I’m here.”When he rode down a New York escalator in June 2015, Trump demonised immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and made the building of a wall on the US-Mexico border his signature issue. Eight years later, the essential point remains the same and the incendiary rhetoric has only intensified.In Dubuque, many Trump supporters interviewed by the Guardian identified the border, which receives hours of coverage on Fox News, as their top priority – one that Democrats ignore at their peril. The candidate duly devoted the first half-hour of his speech to it, repeatedly drawing a contrast between his own presidency and that of Biden’s.“Under my leadership we had the most secure border in US history, acknowledged by everybody; now we have the worst border probably in the history of the world,” he said. “Just think of what we achieved under the Trump administration: I ended the human, economic and national security calamity known as catch-and-release.”Trump made the wildly exaggerated claim that mobs of unscreened, unvetted illegal alien migrants were “stampeding” across the southern border “by the millions and millions”. He continued: “This is an invasion and I’m the one candidate who from day one knows exactly how to stop it.”As in 2016, he recited The Snake, based on a song in which a “tenderhearted woman” finds a half-frozen snake on a path and rescues it, only to be bitten – supposedly a parable about the dangers of being soft on immigration. As in 2016, he mocked the “fake news” media and hurled nicknames at his political rivals, even repurposing “Crooked” Hillary Clinton as “Crooked” Joe Biden.But if there is a difference, a second Trump term is set to be even harsher and more extreme than the first. He vowed to move thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to the border and deploy the navy to impose a “fentanyl blockade”, arguing: “Before we defend the borders of foreign countries, we must secure the border of our country.”The former president went on: “We’ll carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. I’ll also invoke immediately the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members.” He also promised to expand on a travel ban that barred people from several countries with majority-Muslim populations during his presidency.Trump is also known to be planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power at the expense of the administrative state if he wins re-election next year. Referring to it as “our second term”, he said: “It is the greatest movement in the history of our country and probably any country and, if we do this, it will be written about for hundreds of years. We have to do it much bigger.”The rally came amid fresh criticism from conservatives of Trump over his refusal to commit to a national restriction on abortion and description of DeSantis’s signing of a six-week ban as a “terrible mistake”. Trump told the crowd in Dubuque that they needed to “follow their heart” but warned that Republicans needed to “learn how to talk” about legislation in a way that does not turn off voters.Carving out exceptions in any ban for instances of rape, incest and risk to the mother’s life was vital, he said. “Without the exceptions, it is very difficult to win elections. We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 without the exceptions and perhaps the presidency itself.”Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, has condemned Trump’s position but his followers here seemed at peace with it. Only one told the Guardian that he was “slightly” troubled by the comments. Many have been on the eight-year journey and are sticking with him through thick and thin.Indeed, whereas for millions of Democratic and independent voters Trump’s first term and its fiery denouement are his biggest liability, an essay in American carnage, for the true believers of the Maga movement they are his biggest asset.Dawn Ruff, 55, who went to a Trump rally in Dubuque when he first ran for president, said: “I want the economy back to the way it was. I thought he did a good job when he was in there.”The White House quotes figures showing that inflation is in decline and unemployment at a 50-year low. But Ruff responded: “Yeah, that’s their opinion. They’re not the ones that have to worry about going to the gas pump and pumping gas that’s almost five bucks a gallon. When Trump was in there it was a dollar something.”Laci Doyle, 19, a student nurse who will vote for the first time next year, agreed that things were better under Trump. “Our country was at its highest point when he was president. We need to get back to what it used to be, because I think our country was a lot happier and less divided when he was president.”Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four-year presidency, according to a Washington Post count. But Doyle added: “Yeah, he says some stupid stuff – the tweets and everything – but that doesn’t bother me because ultimately he’s an honest, truthful person. I like his personality. I like that he’s a businessman.”Trump is facing 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions, but Susan Tayloe, 59, who works for a bank, said: “He obviously has a great respect for the rule of law and also just he’s shown when he was in office before that he got a lot of things accomplished for a lot of people and did a lot of good things. He got persecuted and I like him even better now because of that.”Asked what she would like to see Trump do in a second term, Tayloe replied: “I would like to see the border closed. I would like to see drilling: drill, baby, drill. We have tons of oil here. Why are we shutting down Alaska reserves? We bought Alaska for the oil. Let’s use it. More energy independence. I’d like to see less of this Green New Deal bullshit.” More