Spending three months in the United States provides plenty of opportunity to observe the two warring tribes of America. It’s likely Joe Biden and Donald Trump are set for a rematch in November this year but there’s no guarantee. Come January 2025, maybe the Trump-haters will have their way and The Donald will find himself in the Big House rather than the White House. Or perhaps the very latest anti-dementia medication will not be sufficient to keep Biden even intermittently lucid. Kamala Harris anyone? So, there’s still a way to go.

The Iowa caucuses on Monday, 15 January, took place less than a week after we arrived here in the Midwest. Some pundits were hoping Trump would fall short of 50 per cent, the goal he set himself before walking that back on the eve of the vote. He needn’t have worried. The former president exceeded expectations, winning 51 per cent and causing both Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis not only to drop out but to endorse him, the former more enthusiastically than the latter. Nikki Haley opted to remain in the contest and fight it out with Trump in New Hampshire.

The Guardian’s editorial staff, as to be expected, sounded off on the ‘wrongness’ of Trump claiming victory in Iowa, albeit from a new angle. Our favourite left-wing newspaper fulminated against rural folk who voted for a man so obviously lacking an ethical framework. Now accused of 91 felonies in four criminal cases, Donald Trump should be an anathema for the morally upright (‘morally uptight’ is how the Guardian might ordinarily classify them) folk of rural Iowa. Self-identifying Christians had hypocritically decided it was ‘better to win with vice than lose with virtue’. Driven by spite and ego, according to the Guardian, ‘Trump didn’t create the hostilities found in the US,’ but had ‘ruthlessly exploited them for his selfish needs’. Joe Biden, on the other hand, wanted only ‘to restore the old norms of stable, civil politics’. Of course.

In some ways, at least, the Guardian editorial was not entirely off the mark. The ‘hostilities’ in America did exist before Candidate Trump descended ‘the famous escalator’ in 2015 – unchecked illegal immigration, the export of manufacturing jobs to Chii-naah, political correctness (subsequently known as wokeism), George W. Bush’s miliary adventurism, Barack Obama’s appeasement et al. You could say Trump ‘ruthlessly exploited’ these issues for ‘his selfish needs’ or, more generously, adopted these policies because, with the sharp eye of a businessman-cum-politician, he knew they were hot-button issues that few others, including high-profile politicians, Republican or Democrat, were addressing.

Speculatively speaking, perhaps these topics were simply taboo and – from the perspective of America’s power elite – not meant to be addressed. Maybe Trump the billionaire/celebrity didn’t get the memo. Most likely someone mentioned to him he was playing with fire when he announced his intention to vanquish ‘the insiders’ on behalf of ‘the outsiders’ (later referred to as ‘the deplorables’) but his unreasonable vanity only encouraged him to ‘disturb the universe’.

Certainly, Democrat progressives and Republican moderates have treated everything Trump has done – and not done – since 14 June, 2015 as evil, from being Putin’s puppet to organising an insurrection on 6 January, 2021. This is the mythology that allowed Biden, on the third anniversary of the protests at the Capitol, to dedicate his second term in office to saving democracy from the peril of another Trump presidency. ‘We nearly lost America that day,’ he proclaimed. Any questioning of that view – for instance, the absence of weapons on the part of protesters, the presence of FBI provocateurs amongst those who found their way to the heart of the Capitol building and so on – is simply dismissed as ‘insurrection denial’.

Progressives have made everything in their almost decade-long war against Trump existential. The actress Alyssa Milano’s infamous tweet, ‘The red Maga hat is the new white hood’, encapsulates the hoary invective of those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The Trump-haters, inevitably enough, have devised a counterpart to TDS – the Cult of Donald. If people are foolish enough to vote for a fellow who, as the mainstream media have repeatedly informed the public, is a racist/Nazi/fill-in-the-blank, they must be in the grip of a cult.

My take, after only three weeks here and almost all of that limited to Ohio, could not be more different. If Trump manages to win the general election this November, it won’t be on account of the Cult of Donald but despite Trump’s histrionics. In that sense, at least, the Guardian is right to note the discrepancy between Trump’s brash showmanship and the seriousness of those prepared to vote for him.

Even a short drive along the Ohio Valley tells of a world devasted by the closing of steel mills and the loss of manufacturing over the past two decades – the population of Steubenville, to take one case, has fallen from a peak of 50,000 to something closer to 18,000. Some important union leaders, including UAW’s Shawn Fein, have endorsed Biden, but indications are that unionists across the country will vote Trump because of his economic nationalism.

It is a similar story with practising Roman Catholics. In 1960 they mostly came out in favour of Kennedy simply because JFK happened to be Catholic. Biden is Catholic but on the eve of the New Hampshire primary the nationwide organisation CatholicVote.org endorsed Trump. Why? Trump’s position on abortion. Bluntly put, the issues in America are bigger than the personalities of the respective candidates. John, owner of a brilliant bookshop in downtown Steubenville, grew up in modest circumstances in New York at the time Trump was a bumptious local celebrity – enough to inoculate him forever against the personal charms of Trump. I couldn’t get him to say one positive word about the ex-president’s character. But would John vote for him? He looked almost pained: ‘Well, a country needs a border, right?’

Trump’s unreasonable vanity trips him up as much as others, his ungracious words towards Nikki Haley after the New Hampshire primary being a case in point. Yet his capacity to take on his myriad of powerful enemies in America – often doubling as the most powerful people in America – requires something kinder than unreasonable vanity. Let us retire that name, in true Trumpian fashion, and call it creative vanity.