MONTICELLO, Iowa — The Table of Knowledge was delving into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plans to upend government, and marveling at how he had forced his fellow Republicans in the House to reverse themselves on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“He’s getting responses; things are happening,” Jerry Retzlaff, a retiree, said. “He got Congress to turn themselves around with one tweet.”

“There’s no secret the press doesn’t like him, and neither does a lot of the leadership,” he added. “And that’s because he’s planning on making a lot of changes.”

The eight men around a rectangular table, sipping coffee from a hodgepodge of mugs donated by customers, meet daily for breakfasts of French toast, eggs and bacon at Darrell’s diner, all while solving the world’s problems, hence their gathering’s nickname.

Washington may be veering from one Trump pre-inaugural controversy to another: unproved reports of Russia’s holding embarrassing information against him, possible ethical conflicts, the donors and billionaires of his cabinet, his pushback against intelligence findings on Russian hacking in the election. But there does not seem to be much angst in Iowa among those who voted for Mr. Trump, including some Democrats and independents.
Monticello, in rural eastern Iowa, is as close as any place to the epicenter of the political quake that made Mr. Trump president.
 
First Street in Monticello, in Jones County. Donald J. Trump carried the county by 20 percentage points in the November election; President Obama had easily won it four years earlier. Credit Ben Brewer for The New York Times 

The state’s longstanding reputation as a political bellwether had led The New York Times to move me to Iowa for a full year ahead of its presidential caucuses in early 2016.

I had not returned since. In the intervening year, Iowa gave  Mr. Trump his largest triumph of any battleground state: a 15-percentage-point reversal over President Obama’s easy victory here in 2012.

Al Ameling, 58, a technical analyst who lives in Marble Rock, near the Minnesota border, is representative of the profound demographic shift among white rural voters in the northern Midwest that helped produce Mr. Trump’s stunning upset. Mr. Ameling voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, sat out in 2012 and enthusiastically backed Mr. Trump. Nothing he has heard since Election Day has shaken his support, including reports this week that American intelligence agencies are investigating unverified accounts of meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials, as well as sex tapes purportedly made of Mr. Trump in Moscow. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the allegations completely false.

“The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it’s all a lie,” Mr. Ameling said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He added he was more concerned that government officials might have leaked the material to the news media. “I don’t know if it was classified, but if it was, whoever leaked it needs to go to jail,” he said. “We need law and order back in this country.”

I headed to Monticello because it was the site of Hillary Clinton’s first campaign stop after declaring her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 2015. When she rolled up in her black van, a pack of journalists took off at a run, myself included, an enduringly silly image.

Mrs. Clinton rarely returned to the state in the general election campaign, giving it up as all but lost. Jones County, which includes Monticello, is the birthplace of the painter Grant Wood, and where older men still wear the style of pinstriped overalls in his “American Gothic.” It is a beautiful place, with bald eagles soaring over wintry farm fields. Mr. Trump carried the county by 20 percentage points; Mr. Obama easily won there four years earlier...........