A nuanced impeachment conversation in deep-red Iowa

Trump hasn’t stopped the country’s leftward slide, Hall said, but America could endure “a four-year term of one of the members of the kook left.” “We’re in a better position now to withstand it than we were B.T.E.—before [the] Trump era.” Hall is a transplant from Des Moines, and he’s found that in northwest Iowa, “people truly are in a bubble,” he told me. “They have no idea how bad it is out there. And they have no idea that if they don’t stand up, and if they don’t fight, they’re going to lose it.”

Locals like Lee, however, see the Trump era not as an epic fight, but as a source of lament. “I wouldn’t lose sleep if there actually was an impeachment,” he said. He doesn’t want his parishioners to have to make another “agonizing choice” in 2020, which he called “caustic to the soul” for the moral trade-offs it would require. “I think many of us are hoping he does get impeached,” Lee said. “Then that conflicted choice won’t be presented.”