DES MOINES, Iowa—Former President Donald Trump doesn’t arrive at the Iowa State Fair until Aug. 12—along with at least seven other 2024 presidential candidates—but the GOP frontrunner’s advance team and boosters were all over the sprawling midway grid and a visible presence at rivals’ stump speeches.
None of the hopefuls, however, were staging events where former Arizona gubernatorial candidate and MAGA maven Kari Lake went upon her arrival at the fair: into a steamy, scented barn to milk a cow.
An Iowa native raised on a farm, Ms. Lake made points with each pull, asking between the swish, swish, swish of freshly spurt milk if any reporters from the New York Times were around so they could see living proof “that there are only two genders.”
If this exhibition didn’t suffice, she invited anyone unsure about how many genders there are to go to the nearby bullpen “and milk a bull and see how that goes.”
Four presidential candidates were on the grounds—former Vice President Mike Pence, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, Michigan businessman Perry Johnson, conservative radio host Larry Elder, Jr.—stumping at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox and joining Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for ‘Fair Side Chats.’ Texas pastor and entrepreneur Ryan Binkley was making rounds.
But it was Ms. Lake, a prospective 2024 Arizona senate candidate, and potential Trump running mate, who stole the show on the second day of the 11-day Iowa State Fair.
More than 1 million visitors and at least 13 presidential candidates are expected to prowl the 445-acre fairgrounds near the State Capitol complex east of downtown Des Moines before the fair ends Aug. 20. At least seven, including Mr. Trump, will be on scene Aug. 12.
Ms. Lake said the former president enjoys venues like the Iowa State Fair, where he plans to meet and greet folks on the midway “because he is a man of the people” rather than participate in the fair’s scheduled event. His campaign only announced he was coming on Aug. 8.
And so Ms. Lake was on Team Trump’s vanguard, ensuring the former president, who leads GOP rivals by 30 percentage points in national polls but not by as such wide margins in Iowa, remains first and foremost in voters’ minds.
“I am going to do everything I can to help President Trump,” she said, noting the nation is suffering under the tutelage of the Biden administration. “I’m really just a mom who is tired of where this country is going.”
Ms. Lake said as a native Iowan who grew up on a farm, she understands the importance of agriculture. “Iowa feeds the United States and the world,” she said, “and the president knows that” too.
Senate or Trump’s VP Running Mate?
One of 2024’s most pivotal Senate races will be in Arizona, where Republicans have a good chance to gain a seat in their effort to recapture the Senate.
Incumbent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, elected in 2018 as a Democrat before leaving the party in December 2022, has not announced her 2024 intentions but is expected to seek a second six-year term.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) announced in January that he was running for Ms. Sinema’s seat. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb and former gubernatorial candidate George Nicholson are the two most prominent Republican hopefuls.
With an April 8 filing deadline for the state’s Aug. 6, 2024 primary, much is in flux in the key battleground state, but a contentious three-way race appears likely.
Ms. Lake said she is pondering entering the GOP primary to win the party nod to take on Ms. Sinema and Mr. Gallego.
“I am strongly considering it,” she said, promising a decision by fall. “I need to take a look at the field” to ensure the Republicans field a candidate that can “meet the needs of the people of Arizona.”
Rumor had it that Ms. Lake would be appearing later at Steak & Stein, a restaurant bar on the fairgrounds midway, and would be bartending.
She was, she said, but had not heard about the bartending gig. But, no problem, she can do that.
“I know how to milk a cow and I know how to tap a beer,” Ms. Lake said. “I’d do it if they let me.”
Even without Mr. Trump on the scene, Aug. 12 will be a busy day for midway politicking with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump administration U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—all already campaigning across the Hawkeye State—joining Gov. Reynolds for morning ‘Fair Side Chats.’
Mr. Ramaswamy and Ms. Haley will later that day appear on Des Moines Register Political Soapbox along with Republican pastor and business owner Ryan Binkley and Democrats Marianne Williamson—who will be on stage as Mr. Trump is speaking elsewhere on the fairgrounds—and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Former Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and former Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) will be campaigning at the fair next week.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
