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Was this a deepfake Trump? No, it was really him...

I couldn’t believe my eyes, writes Jon Sopel, when post-Iowa Trump appeared to be magnanimous in victory, conciliatory almost. But it wasn’t long before he cast off the cloak of humility and was back on the ugly, racist attack, orange in tooth and claw

Friday 19 January 2024 14:07 GMT

All smiles: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign event in Atkinson, New Hampshire (AP)

The polls were right. Trump smashed it. Left his rivals gasping for air in the dust. And made the most powerful statement that you could possibly make that the Republican Party is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is the Republican Party. Back in 2016, the last time he ran in Iowa and lost to Ted Cruz, the same could not be said.

And with victory came a strange new tune. On stage, after the networks called the result for him, Trump sounded – and I can’t believe I’m writing this – almost magnanimous, conciliatory, unifying even. He spoke about how the nation needed to come together; how it didn’t matter whether you were a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, the United States of America was more important. I thought at first, I might be looking at some deepfake generated by AI. But, no – it was him.

However, don’t be gulled, Donald Trump is still red in tooth and claw. Well, orange, actually. Indeed, the day after the Iowa result and he was in a courtroom in New York (where else?), there was a photo of him waving on the street outside – in the foreground is one of his US Secret Service agents. The bodyguard looks perfectly normal. Trump, on the other hand, looks as though he has been irradiated.

But while Trump’s victory was overwhelming, it wasn’t complete. As I wrote last week, Nikki Haley is looking competitive in New Hampshire, which will vote on Tuesday. If she were to win there, and if she could take that momentum onto the next state to vote, South Carolina – where she used to be the governor – then you never know. Highly, highly unlikely that she could go on to win the Republican nomination but not completely impossible.

Donald Trump knows that, too. The cloak of humility he’d worn on Monday night obviously had to be returned the next day to the theatrical costumiers from where he’d hired it because, by Wednesday night, he was back in his more normal clothes – and on the attack.

It was ugly. It was racist. And it was – sadly – true to form.

On his social media platform Truth Social, he started referring to Haley by her Indian birth name of Nimarata. She is of Punjabi origin, and Nikki is her middle name – one she has used since she was at primary school in the US. Actually, Trump misspelt her name and called her Nimrada, but you get the gist.

Why the need to underline her Indian heritage? Because he could smell a threat to him. And when he feels threatened, he lashes out.

Trump uses dog-whistle politics with all the subtlety of an air-raid siren. You would have to be deaf not to hear it. A week earlier, he hinted that she was not fit constitutionally to be a presidential candidate because her parents weren’t born in the US. But she was. And that is the vital qualification.

It is the “birtherism” that he tried for years against Barack Obama. Based on precisely zero evidence, Trump asserted that Obama was born in Kenya, not in Hawaii, as stated on his birth certificate. He wouldn’t let it go. And all through the 2016 election campaign, he’d refer to the sitting president by his full name – Barack Husain Obama. And in his raucous rallies around the country, he would place special weight on the middle name Husssaaaaaiiin, just to emphasise the foreignness of it, lest anyone should be in any doubt. Subtle, huh?

And the more it caused a storm of liberal protest, the more he liked it – it was playing to the not-so-better angels of American voters. I remember sitting in the White House briefing room while he stood at the podium pretending not to know how to pronounce Kamala Harris’s first name – she has south Asian heritage on her mother’s side and Caribbean on her father’s. He tried a whole series of variations, for comic effect – again, to leave you in no doubt that she wasn’t quite white (or orange) like him. And, therefore, not quite legitimate to be a holder of high office.

The weird thing is the threat that Haley poses is marginal; do you need to deploy tactics like that? And in independent-minded New Hampshire – which is very different from predominantly white, Christian-conservative Iowa – is this going to work for or against you?

Also, for all the talk of reconciliation, straight after the Iowa victory speech, it was back to business as normal in another sense. There is a Virginia congressman called Bob Good. In the House of Representatives, he chairs the Freedom Caucus, the most Trump-aligned grouping there is. It is Maga through and through. But Good did bad. He backed Ron DeSantis in the run-up to Iowa. And hell hath no fury like a Trump scorned. “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita told a southern Virginia-based newspaper this week.

The threat and menacing nature of that is the real Trump modus operandi. Ideological alignment is nothing. He wants devotion, and he will come after anyone who doesn’t give him that. Much better to be feared than loved, as old Niccolo Machiavelli used to say. Or to quote from Voltaire’s Candide (as Trump is not wont to do), pour encourager les autres. Better to stay in line or end up dead like the French writer’s admiral.

Before Iowa, there was a flurry of endorsements for Trump from members of Congress who are known to be critics of him. They could see the way the wind was blowing and were terrified to be on the wrong side of history. Trump smirked and said to one of his confidantes: “You see, they always bend the knee eventually.”