Here’s a portrait of how Donald Trump reclaims power.

At a Hoover Institution conference here last week, former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — who in 2020 denounced the former president as a threat to the Constitution — said retired generals “need to go silent during elections” and argued that the “American people do not need military officers telling them how to vote.”

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) was on the same panel with Mattis and said afterward that the former president is dominating the lead-off Iowa caucuses: “It’s all Trump.” Yet Ernst explained she could not intervene to try to stop him in her home state because she’s concerned about “jeopardizing our first in the nation” nominating status.

Also at Stanford was New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. He told me he would back a Trump challenger in the next couple of weeks, but that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds didn’t give him a head’s up on her endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that he found her timing odd. (He was being polite: Sununu has privately been even more critical of Reynolds’ decision, I’m told.)