Eight years ago, the signs covered the landscape.
“TRUMP-PENCE,” they read.
When I drove over Iowa backroads in the late summer of 2016, those campaign signs were everywhere. It seemed as though every other farm had one.
Some were huge and splayed across barn roofs. Most were smaller and either posted in fields or attached to fence lines. A few were handmade, bedsheets painted with the candidates’ names and then tied to clotheslines.
At the time, I misread what they meant.
I thought they were just more evidence that Donald Trump was running a 20th-century campaign when the 21st century was well under way. It seemed like just one more sign that he was going to lose.
What I missed by focusing on the candidate was noticing the fervor of his followers.
The folks who posted those signs were saying something. Many of them had to do more than just sign their names to a petition or some other form to put those signs up.
Turning a barn roof into a billboard takes work. So does painting a sheet and turning it into a political statement.
The Americans who did that eight years ago spent that time, that energy, that labor because they wanted the world and all of their neighbors to know how they felt. They wanted to let us all know that they felt they’d been ignored for too long, their concerns disregarded and their hopes denied. They felt they’d been left behind by a nation and a world that often seemed not to know they existed.
Donald Trump was for them both messenger and message — the perfect vehicle for screaming their frustration out across the land.
Their long pent-up and finally released yawps of anger and even rage carried Donald Trump to the White House — and led to the tumultuous eight years since.
This time, on another long drive through rural Iowa, I am more alert and attuned to the messages the landscape might send.
There are a few “TRUMP-VANCE” signs here and there, but not nearly as many as there were eight years ago. They dot, rather than smother, the landscape.
I have yet to see a barn roof devoted to the former president’s campaign to return to power. Nor have I spotted any handmade signs, this time around — no painted sheets or boards with Trump’s name scrawled across them.
Until a few weeks ago, the former president’s prospects of returning to the White House seemed good — better certainly than they were at this time eight years ago. When President Joe Biden still was in the race, Trump led in most national polls — in some, by more than the margin of error — and always had secured slim edges in the key battleground states.
It seemed that the MAGA crowd could look forward to a restoration.
His fortunes have turned since then, of course. The emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ standard bearer has flipped this election year on its head.
In the past, though, when Trump found himself in trouble, his supporters rallied to him, ratcheting up their devotion in escalated proportion to their perceptions of his peril.
Eight years ago, the likelihood that he was going to be defeated prompted the explosion of signs I saw covering the landscape.
Now, not so much.
The question is, why?
What accounts for the change?
I’d like to think that at least part of the reason is that people everywhere have begun to cool down a little bit.
Anger is the greatest motivator and force in politics. Nothing drives people to the polls the way that rage does.
But it’s also the most transitory. It’s hard to stay in a state of high dudgeon for years on end.
Eventually, we all get tired of being mad and settle down.
Regardless of the reason, the relative absence of Trump signs has improved the view.
I’ve never seen a campaign placard that was anywhere near as pretty as an open field. And no political message ever has enhanced the simple beauty of a classic American barn.
It’s good to see this country again, unadorned and unobstructed.
Just America, in all its plain glory.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
