DAVENPORT, Iowa — Donald Trump is over the Republican primary and ready for the main event.

With new polls reaffirming his dominance and Ben Carson’s decline, Trump is showing less interest in recent days in his Republican rivals and more in general election strategy and Hillary Clinton’s personal life.


Trump added to the picture of a man apart from the field by holding rallies in northwest Iowa and eastern Iowa on Saturday, skipping the Cedar Rapids GOP cattle call where five other Republicans — including Carson and Ted Cruz — took turns speaking on a single stage at an event hosted by FreedomWorks.

Asked at his first stop in Spencer in northwest Iowa to respond to allies of Jeb Bush who have labeled him a “fascist,” Trump, who usually relishes the opportunity to counterattack those who criticize him, shrugged. “He’s desperate. You know Jeb is desperate right now. He’s doing very badly, and he’s a desperate person.”

Asked to name the Republican who represents the “biggest threat” to him, Trump shrugged again. “I don’t know. I think I’d have to ask you,” he told a reporter from CNN.

“Ted Cruz is at 16 percent,” ventured the reporter.

“That’s fine,” Trump responded. “Maybe Ted, maybe Marco [Rubio], whoever’s, you know, closest. But it seems that Marco is doing a little bit better. I don’t look at it as competition, to be honest. He can’t do what I do. Nobody can do what I do.”

Trump’s extemporaneous remarks looked forward to the need for strong Republican turnout next fall. “There’s a structural advantage that the Democrats have, you know that,” he told his supporters in Davenport. “Unless you get out and really vote, come November you’re not going to win.”

Having led in all but a handful of national polls since mid-July — Trump currently holds a double-digit lead in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — the billionaire businessman has good cause to turn his eye toward November 2016, his allies say.

“At this point, he is the overwhelming favorite to be nominated, so it is obvious he should begin thinking about the general election,” said longtime Trump political adviser Roger Stone, who parted ways with the campaign in August but remains in touch with his former client.



At the time of the Paris attacks last month, Trump and Carson were locked in a statistical dead heat in the Real Clear Politics average of recent national polling. Since then, Trump has surged back to the mid-September peak from which he fell after the second primary debate. Carson, meanwhile, has tumbled. A CNN/ORC poll released on Friday showed Carson in third place behind Cruz with 14 percent support, down 8 percentage points from a CNN poll conducted in October.

At various points in the primary, Trump has made pointed personal attacks on Bush’s energy levels, Carson’s “pathological” anger, Rubio’s perspiration, Carly Fiorina’s personal appearance and Rick Perry’s intelligence.

Trump has explained that at first he targeted Bush most intensely because he assumed Bush would be the front-runner but that he has let up in his criticisms of the former Florida governor as his candidacy has flailed. As Bush faded in national polls and establishment Republicans turned increasingly to Rubio, the young senator became a more frequent target of Trump’s insults. When Carson gained strength with evangelicals and began to rival Trump in Iowa and nationally, the businessman went after his honesty and mental health.

Trump claimed Carson’s stories about his violent childhood, which include attacking his mother with a hammer, made the retired neurosurgeon either mentally unfit for the presidency or a liar. At a rally in Iowa last month, Trump memorably acted out Carson’s claim that he had once attempted to stab a childhood friend but was foiled by the boy’s belt buckle. As Carson’s support has slipped in recent weeks, Trump has relented on the personal attacks.

Still, even as he looks to the horizon, Trump can’t resist denigrating his current GOP opponents. At his second stop on Saturday, in Davenport, the billionaire referred to Rubio as a “puppet” of wealthy donors and mocked Lindsey Graham’s relationship with John McCain. “What are they, the Bobbsey twins?” asked Trump. “They’re always together.”

But he spent more time — and creative energy — on presumptive Democratic nominee Clinton, expanding on his criticism, first leveled in mid-November, that the former secretary of state lacks the stamina to be president.

“She doesn’t have the strength, she doesn’t have the stamina,” Trump intoned repeatedly, painting a caricature of a secretary of state chatting with friends while ignoring missives out of Benghazi from Ambassador Chris Stevens and of a presidential candidate who sleeps for days on end between public appearances.

“You don’t see her for four or five days,” said Trump. “Then four or five days later you see her. She awakens, puts on her pantsuit, goes out and does a press conference.”

Trump has consistently bashed Clinton’s job performance on the stump, but in recent days his remarks have increasingly wandered toward the Democratic front-runner’s personal life. At a rally on Friday night in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump also mentioned Clinton’s pantsuits in the course of questioning her stamina.

On Thursday, he turned to Clinton’s relationship with close aide Huma Abedin, a subject he’s mined before. During his remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, at which Trump told the group of influential donors that he would not get its support and that he did not care, he joked about the “interesting friendship” between Clinton and Abedin.

Clinton finds herself increasingly forced to respond to Trump’s sallies. Sunday, on ABC News’ “This Week,” Clinton was asked to respond to a recent clip of Trump’s criticism of her stamina.

“Well, who can agree with anything he says that is, you know, subject to one second of fact checking?” she said. “Look, if he gets the nomination, I will be more than happy to campaign against him.”

