Trump is set on making the border wall the central issue in the next election – candidates will have to find their own narrative to counter him

The 2020 presidential campaign started amid a government shutdown premised on walling us off from the world. And just the other weekend, the government reopened for three weeks to see if we could come to terms with our identity as a nation of immigrants.

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Here in north-west Iowa, Congressman Steve King came home to a town hall meeting in Primghar. His rehabilitation after his white supremacist remarks and protecting “our” culture is underway. And as he stood there, quoting Rudyard Kipling to the gathered crowd, King made clear that Donald Trump will not relent on his border wall. When those who raise livestock asked him about the need for help, they were told that we first need order at the border. Stripped of his committee stripes by the minority leader, King assured the crowd that he is now liberated to pursue his national(ist) agenda. They seemed OK with that.

At the time, the president was threatening calling a national emergency over immigration, and his chief of staff said he is serious as a heart attack. King’s OK with that, and nobody in Primghar is much saying otherwise.

Progressives marveled at a woman – Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House – standing down Trump by barring his entry to the House to speak on the State of the Union.

Three more women announced their candidacies amid this chaos: Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Harris came out of the gate on race and unity, her parents were both immigrants. Gillibrand is taking tough questions on her former hawkish views on immigration as an upstate New York representative who was converted to a more diverse view in the Big Apple.

The shutdown was Trump's opening salvo for the entire campaign

Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, was raising hell in Puerto Rico over disenfranchisement, crushing debt and failed hurricane relief amid complete government dysfunction. Sherrod Brown of Ohio promised to bring his Dignity of Work tour to Iowa, as federal workers awaited their checks from the past month or more, and farmers breathed a sigh of relief with bankers as they try to arrange spring farm rents and planting.

On that same weekend Representative Eric Swalwell, a Bay Area neighbor of Harris’s, was on television talking about the indictment of Roger Stone, the dirty trickster for Richard Nixon and now Trump. Swalwell wants to run, too, from his perch on the House prosecution team. He often suggests that Trump’s chaos, like the shutdown, is designed to distract from his original sin of dancing with the Russians. John Hickenlooper, who founded a brew pub in Colorado, tapped a keg from a pub in Des Moines and talked of pragmatism and common sense while King was still talking shutdown and cave-ins, and by gum that wall.

And, in late January, Beto O’Rourke made it home to El Paso after meeting indigenous people along the old Great Western Cattle Trail, up through Tucumcari and the Great Plains of Kansas. He took a left at Dodge City and made his penultimate lighting in Taos, New Mexico, with the indigenous people on the butte. He learned of how Pueblos blend their spirituality with Catholicism. After his days in the desert he too dwelled on the need for unity as he further reflected on his next stop unknown.

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To cap it all off on 60 Minutes, Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks and billionaire extraordinaire, thought nothing of throwing $500m or so into an independent race. The two political parties are not up to it, his line went. He has the answer to shutdown fever, says a man who appears to think the corporation is the basic social unit that upholds mores, and not political parties. Which sounds similar to the current occupant and to Ross Perot, and maybe a little like Michael Bloomberg. There is no Starbucks in Primghar. Ethanol producers don’t like sugar taxes like Bloomberg does. If Schultz runs it “gives Trump his best hope of getting re-elected”, candidate Julián Castro of Texas told CNN.

Every Latino knows what that means. More wall. More persecution. No asylum.

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Many wonder if a more amiable sort could ease us back from this political precipice. Uncle Joe Biden, who can slap backs in the Senate with the best of them, might have seen his hour pass. What’s so bad about speaking on behalf of a Republican? he wondered to scowls from the combatants on the left flank. John Delaney would like to be in that place, a moderate businessman who is somewhat suspect among the progressives in Iowa and New Hampshire. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota tries to toe that line, but has yet to announce against a formidable field. They say that Warren, who may have set the bar with an Iowa barnstorm two weeks into the shutdown assailing corruption, could meet her comeuppance in Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, and Harris and Cory Booker in South Carolina. It’s all fed into the breech that is the national conversation, as it were.

O’Rourke seems to frame the existential question: “As the country literally begins to shut down, how can we come together to revive her?” O’Rourke asked himself in an epistle from Taos.

He knows we can, but he couldn’t yet say how, and that might be the question that keeps him bound, so far, to his home and young family in the Borderlands.

King, the proxy for Trump, was not so much interested in the answer. Trump is set on the border being the issue heading right up to the next election. The shutdown was his opening salvo for the entire campaign. Iowa will play a role in moderating that schism, looking for that candidate with an iron fist inside a velvet glove.