'Where’s Melania?' Iowa Republicans hound Trump as donors designate him a 'disaster'

Republican presidential candidates and political spectators exchanged barbs with supporters of criminal defendant ex-President Donald Trump at Saturday's Iowa-Iowa State football match in Ames, The New York Times' Anjali Huynh and Nicholas Nehamas report.

"The former president entered the game to a mix of applause and audible boos, as a plane with a banner reading 'Where's Melania?' flew overhead — a nod to the absence of his wife from the campaign trail. Some attendees gave him the middle finger from the stands while he looked on from the glass-paneled box from which he watched the game," Huynh and Nehamas write.

"Still," they add, "Trump is dominating Iowa in the polls, despite eschewing the town-to-town retail politicking that is tradition in the state."

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Huynh and Nehamas continue, "The attacks came out early, before either candidate arrived at the game. DeSantis' super PAC, Never Back Down, released a new online ad ahead of the game — which was devised to reach digital devices in the area around the stadium — criticizing the former president’s previous support for transgender women competing in the Miss America pageant as 'insanity.' Ripped-up DeSantis posters were strewn across the grounds outside the stadium."

DeSantis told reporters, "Iowans don't want the campaign to be about the past or to be about the candidates' issues,'" the Times recalls. "They want it to be about their future and the future of this country. And that's what I represent."

Ex-Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson — whom the Times notes "is barely making an impression in the polls" — also swiped at criminal defendant Trump, saying, "Donald Trump's not going to speak the truth in this election. But America needs to move in a different direction, and we don't need a 'Trump-lite,' either."

Meanwhile, Times correspondent Rebecca Davis O’Brien expounds, "Many of the Republican Party's wealthiest donors" are experiencing a "growing sense of urgency about the state of the GOP presidential primary race. Trump's grip on the party's voters is as powerful as ever, with polls in Iowa and New Hampshire last month putting him at least 25 percentage points above his nearest rivals."

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O'Brien explains, "That has left major Republican donors — whose desires have increasingly diverged from those of conservative voters — grappling with the reality that the tens of millions of dollars they have spent to try to stop the former president, fearing he poses a mortal threat to their party and the country, may already be a sunk cost."

O'Brien points out that "more than a dozen Republican donors and their allies revealed hand-wringing, magical thinking, calls to arms and, for some, fatalism" regarding Trump's hold over the GOP's base.

Republican fundraiser Eric Levine, for instance, lamented to donors on Labor Day, "I refuse to accept the proposition that Donald Trump is the 'inevitable' Republican nominee for President. His nomination would be a disaster for our party and our country."

Levine later added to the Times, "If things don't change quickly, people are going to despair."

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Huynh's and Nehamas' scoop continues at this link. O'Brien's is here (subscription required).