The bus tells you everything you need to know because the bus is a piece of shit. You would expect a Donald Trump campaign bus to be MOST LUXURIOUS, MOST DESIRED, NUMBER ONE BUS in the world, with a solid-gold chassis and marble toilets and a rooftop fuck cabana. This is not that bus. “It’s just a bus,” one Trump staffer told me, which is exactly right. It’s an old cross-country bus that still smells like an old cross-country bus, only it’s painted blue, with the name TRUMP in huge letters across both sides, plus the campaign hashtag #Make America Great Again! Trump says he has copyrighted it (“I’m using that a lot, and I think it’s a great statement”) even though you can’t actually put exclamation points or spaces in a hashtag.

The bus is basically a rolling version of Trump’s Atlantic City: it’s built to look nice for a single day, then it falls into disrepair the moment you’ve stopped paying attention. From a distance, though, the bus looks like a monument. You see the name, and you take in everything that name connotes—wealth, ego, poor taste—and the bus has done its job. This is Trump’s bus, and it dominates the landscape the moment it arrives. People from all around take selfies near it. Why? Because TRUMP, that’s why.

And the bus is working. Perhaps you’ve noticed—or perhaps you’re trying not to notice—but Donald Trump is leading all current Republican candidates in the national polls, and his lead is growing. And so it doesn’t really matter whether you see this as an alarming sign of the nation’s growing lunacy, or as a reckoning for a GOP that has been awash for years in hateful rhetoric, or as a byproduct of Trump’s masterful ability to hijack all political coverage by embracing his role as America’s Master Idiot. He’s doing it. At least for a brief moment, he’s winning. And he may extend his lead once the GOP debates begin Thursday night. Trump has managed to plaster his name all over this election as if it were one of his overpriced condos, and he has drawn the crowds as a result.

And these are real voters out here who are responding to him: real voters who are lining up for his rallies in large numbers (not as large as Trump claims, but still!), real voters who hang on every word of his ridiculous pitch for how he will wheel and deal America back to the top.

But who the fuck are these people? Are they blind? Are they crazy? Have they been brainwashed by all the giant signs? Or is it possible they see something in Trump that the rest of us don’t? What makes someone want to seriously consider voting for this man? I didn’t know what the answer was, but I wanted to see for myself. I needed to make it make sense. So I went to Iowa—Iowa: The State You Grew Up Swearing You’d Leave One Day!™—to meet them. And to see The Donald in the flesh.

Every election dispatch from Iowa is required to include a bit of scenery-setting, to show you just how folksy Iowa is: corn, state fairs, dragonflies, balloon museums, smiling fat babies, etc.

This is not the Iowa I visited. The Donald Trump Make America Great Again Rally and Family Picnic was held in Oskaloosa, a small town 60 miles east of Des Moines. Oskaloosa is like a lot of small Midwestern towns right now: crumbling houses, shuttered businesses, half-empty strip malls. You are surrounded by loss here. One of the few thriving businesses I saw in town, apart from a kickass bar called The Cellar Peanut Pub, was a video store. An actual video store. They didn’t even have to rent porn to stay solvent. They had customers, and they were hiring.