It’s the latest hot TV genre: a woman in a frigid outpost, bundled in puffy outerwear, trying to uncover truths buried in ice.
In the new season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Jodie Foster is a cop trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in a remote Alaska town, described as “the end of the world.” On FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin is an amateur sleuth trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in an isolated retreat in Iceland.
And now I find myself in puffy outerwear, trudging through snow in glacial Iowa, trying to uncover truths buried in the ice.
I don’t have as much of a mystery to unravel as the TV detectives. The only thing the horde of reporters here is trying to figure out is if Donald Trump will win the caucuses on Monday with a plurality or if he can pull off a majority. No one is expecting a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama-style upset.
A blizzard on Friday froze the action. Drivers skidded all over Des Moines, with cars abandoned on highways. Candidates canceled events and scrambled to do telephone town halls. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny donned fleece earmuffs for live reports. Journalists planning to arrive this weekend faced canceled flights. With Trump and the others scrapping in-person rallies, reporters were left jaw-jawing with one another in the lobbies of the Hotel Fort Des Moines and the downtown Marriott.
On Friday evening, Trump posted a video, accusingly telling Iowa, “You have the worst weather, I guess, in recorded history.” Maybe he should have gotten here earlier instead of haranguing the judge in his New York fraud trial on Thursday.
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