Eight years ago this month, William Buckley’s legacy publication, National Review, published a cover story touting a batch of essays from conservative pundits arguing why Republicans should oppose Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. I was attending a weekend seminar organized by the conservative Steamboat Institute to discuss the 2016 election when the magazine was released. Various Republican luminaries, from John Bolton to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page columnist Kimberley Strassel were in attendance. Longshot presidential candidate Ben Carson even made a cameo appearance. The hallway buzz among this well-heeled crowd was their assessment the National Review fusillade would torpedo the Trump dreadnought.

Iowa caucuses were still a few weeks off, scheduled for Feb. 1, and polling indicated Ted Cruz was likely to sweep the meetings, surfing on support from the state’s evangelical voters, which proved correct. The Steamboat participants weren’t entirely thrilled with Ted, either, but he was viewed as better than the Donald. One speaker recounted the Senate cloakroom rejoinder John McCain aimed at Cruz as he complained he couldn’t understand why so many strangers immediately took a dislike to him. “It saves them time, Ted,” McCain wisecracked. It would become evident during following weeks Trump wasn’t pursuing the subscribers of the National Review. In fact, he would repeatedly emphasize his affection for the “poorly educated” — conservative intellectuals be damned.

Sprinkled among Senate Republicans are Ivy Leaguers Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis and the recently departed Ben Sasse of Nebraska, all of whom have undertaken considerable contortions to hide their academic credentials from a voting base increasingly hostile to anything even faintly elite. These wannabe presidential dreamers would prefer Republican voters believe they stumbled onto Ivy campuses entirely by accident and now recognize they would have been better off attending a state university. With the failure of the 2016 jeremiads, I couldn’t help wondering about the wisdom of The Atlantic magazine decision to devote its January 2024 issue to a similar set of essays contemplating the horrors that will ensue “If Trump Wins.” I’m sure they may tickle the erogenous zones of progressive intellectuals, but it’s unlikely they will reach much further than that.

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Last week’s Iowa caucuses delivered a death blow to any lingering aspirations of the four remaining primary candidates as the former president grabbed a majority of Republican votes in a field which had already shed 10 collapsed campaigns. Trump’s victory was large enough he felt free to be uncharacteristically magnanimous with his victory remarks. This did not prevent him from speaking on long enough to thrash his usual list of villains. The former president could not accuse anyone of rigging the results, as he did in 2016, charging Ted Cruz had stolen the Iowa caucuses. We should not be surprised he is now complaining it is ridiculous he is not residing in the White House but out campaigning for a third presidential election victory.

Perhaps most surprising, however, was the report two-thirds of Iowa caucus participants agree Joe Biden stole the 2020 election — that he is an illegitimate president. It’s one thing to know the words to all your team’s cheers but quite another to profess faith in a claim for which there is zero evidence. If theft were true, how in the world have its machinations and culprits remained a mystery four years on? Why has no Democratic whistleblower stepped forward? Stealing an election can’t be organized by a half-dozen well-lubricated poll workers meeting in a swing state wine bar. A theft of this size and scope would require thousands of recruits across the country — their electronic footprints, emails, cash transfers and audio recordings of its plotting waiting to be discovered. We keep finding such data for the Jan. 6, 2021 effort to overturn the 2020 electoral college count. Trust me, Democrats aren’t well enough organized to pull off either nationwide electoral larceny or an attempt to reverse election results once the ballots are counted.

I am still plowing through the avalanche of Trump books, just getting around to the New York Times television critic’s 2019 effort, “Audience of One.” As someone who has never watched a single episode of “The Apprentice,”’ James Poniewozik’s tome was revelatory. “In many ways, Trumpism has been a reaction against… the expansion of the American story. Trumpism was the warning that his followers were being rewritten into supporting characters, and the promise that he would restore them to their rightful place as the leads,” he speculates. That’s an offer which has convinced most supporters to repeat “alternative facts’ — whatever their Dear Leader demands. After the Iowa win, Trump declared, “They don’t investigate the people that cheated in the election. They investigate the people that understand they cheated and go after them. But they don’t investigate the people who cheated like hell.”

Rolling Stone mentions a Trump voter, Iowan Jerry Bolduc, who suggested to reporters the time for neutrality was over. “Pretty soon,” he warns, “you’re gonna have to either pick one side or the other. It’s eat or be eaten. That’s what it’s about, dude!”

Bolduc doesn’t sound like a man likely to be persuaded by well-reasoned critiques of a second Trump term in The Atlantic. With the former president telling his fans if he is declared the 2024 loser, they will know the election was rigged. If you believe this, then Jan. 6, 2021 really was just a rehearsal for Insurrection 2.0. We will all witness another tantrum and, yes, it will be wild.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.