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      This Year’s Iowa Caucuses are Ice-Cold

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      And it’s not just the sub-zero temperatures.It’s the Friday before Caucus Day, and in any other year, Iowa would be humming: candidates racing across the state, answering questions in living rooms, coffee shops and high school gyms. Last-minute get-out-the-vote speeches. Volunteers knocking on doors and handing out leaflets on street corners and in shopping malls.Not this year. Iowa was shut down today, under the threat of a worst-in-a-decade forecast of blinding blizzards and bitter cold. The high temperatures of zero predicted earlier this week now seem positively toasty, compared with what is promised for the days and nights ahead.Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, soldiered out for one event Friday morning before throwing in the shovel, so to speak. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, scratched her in-person schedule, moving the campaign from living rooms to Zoom. Donald Trump is due here on Saturday; stay tuned.“This is about the worst weather I remember for the Iowa caucuses,” said Gordon Fischer, a former Democratic Party state leader, who has lived in Iowa for 40 years.It was a suitably desultory ending for what has turned into a desultory caucus. Even before the blizzard landed on top of Iowa, the campaign was lower in energy or suspense than any I can recall over some 30 years of covering caucuses.In a state where caucus observers were already scrapping for something to speculate about — and where hundreds of out-of-town political reporters are trapped in local hotels with no candidate events to cover — the misery of the weather has added a welcome bit of uncertainty.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      MAGA Has Devoured American Evangelicalism

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      Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.Absent the sort of miracle that would make me reconsider my own lifelong atheism, Trump is going to win Iowa’s caucuses on Monday; the only real question is by how much. Iowa tends to give its imprimatur to the Republican candidate who most connects with religious conservatives: George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, Ted Cruz in 2016. But this year, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Trump leads his nearest Republican rivals by more than 30 points.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In Iowa, Two Friends Debate DeSantis vs. Trump

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      Rob Szypko and Rachel Quester, Paige Cowett and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOn Monday, Iowa holds the first contest in the Republican presidential nominating process and nobody will have more on the line than Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor staked his candidacy on a victory in Iowa, a victory that now seems increasingly remote. Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The Times, and the Daily producers Rob Szypko and Carlos Prieto explain what Mr. DeSantis’s challenge has looked like on the ground in Iowa.On today’s episodeShane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking in Cumming, Iowa, last week. He has campaigned hard in the state.Scott Morgan/ReutersBackground readingA weak night for Donald Trump? A Ron DeSantis flop? Gaming out Iowa.From December: Mr. Trump was gaining in Iowa polling, and Mr. DeSantis was holding off Nikki Haley for a distant second.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Wife’s Hand?

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      In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Fact Checking Nikki Haley’s DeSantis Lies Website

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      During this week’s debate in Iowa, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, tirelessly promoted a website to fact-check Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. We took a closer look, and here’s what we found.More than a dozen times during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, directed viewers to a website purporting to correct what she called Ron DeSantis’s “lies.”But the Haley campaign’s website is itself a political project — not an exercise in objective fact-checking.The site does point to independent fact-checking to help push back on claims twisting Ms. Haley’s positions on things like Gaza refugees and to clarify her comments about being motivated to run for office by a speech made by Hillary Clinton, despite their political differences.But there are key differences between Ms. Haley’s effort and an independent fact-checking operation. The website, for example, doesn’t directly quote Mr. DeSantis or cite the specific comments being rebutted. It also deems a “lie” some statements that don’t actually contain checkable facts.“Mr. DeSantis claims he will take on the big spenders in Washington,” the site says, calling his claim a lie because while in Congress he voted to increase the federal debt limit. Ms. Haley may well use that line of criticism in her campaign, but that alone doesn’t make Mr. DeSantis’s statements about his intent to rein in federal spending a “lie.”“Ultimately it’s still campaign propaganda,” said Bill Adair, the creator of the website PolitiFact and a Duke University journalism professor. “It’s not fact-checking.”It’s certainly not the first time a political campaign has harnessed the style of fact-checking for its own objectives, Mr. Adair said, noting that the 2008 Obama campaign created a website to push back against “smears.”On the debate stage Wednesday, “it was just trumpeted more prominently and more often than I’ve ever seen it before,” Mr. Adair said. He added: “I think that shows that fact-checking has matured to the point where candidates are pretending to be fact checkers to try to give their own account of facts, although often it’s not the full truth.”Here’s further context on several of the claims made on Ms. Haley’s website, Desantislies.com.Gender-transition careThe website states that “DeSantis falsely claims Nikki Haley supports gender-changing surgeries for minors.” It goes on to say that, in fact, Ms. Haley “opposes gender-changing surgeries and puberty blockers for minors and is on record saying as much multiple times.”It is true that Ms. Haley has spoken out against minors being able to undergo gender-transition surgeries before the age of 18. But Mr. DeSantis and other critics have homed in on a comment she made in June — not mentioned on Ms. Haley’s website — suggesting that the law should not be involved in regulating such care.During a CBS interview, Ms. Haley was asked what the law should say regarding transgender care for youths. “I think the law should stay out of it, and I think parents should handle it,” Ms. Haley responded.Still, even then, Ms. Haley added that “when that child becomes 18, if they want to make more of a permanent change they can do that.”Free speechThe website says that “DeSantis falsely claims Haley opposes free speech on social media,” and points out that Mr. DeSantis previously expressed support for legal efforts to crack down on journalists’ use of anonymous sources.But the site ignores that Ms. Haley did in November call for requiring social media users to be verified by name, before walking back her comments amid criticism.“When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms,” Ms. Haley said during a Fox News event. “Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name.”Ms. Haley added: “First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say, and they know their pastor and their family members are going to see it.”Mr. DeSantis quickly criticized her comments, saying, “Haley’s proposal to ban anonymous speech online — similar to what China recently did — is dangerous and unconstitutional.”A day later, Ms. Haley said on CNBC that “life would be more civil” if people did not post anonymously, but noted: “I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech. What I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.”Confronted during the December Republican debate, Ms. Haley misleadingly claimed she “never said government should go and require anyone’s name.”TaxesMr. DeSantis and his supporters have made misleading claims about Ms. Haley’s record on taxes while she was governor of South Carolina. But the claims weren’t always found to be categorically false, as Ms. Haley’s website contends.The website links to four articles, including two from The New York Times. In one example, The Times fact-checked a pro-DeSantis super PAC’s argument that Ms. Haley “raised taxes” and found it to be misleading.That’s because, technically speaking, Ms. Haley cosponsored legislation passed in 2006 that did raise the state sales tax by one percentage point. But that measure also exempted owner-occupants from paying property taxes for schools — among other provisions — and was considered by experts to be a “tax swap,” not a tax increase. An analysis at the time projected that most homeowners would have an overall decreased tax burden.ChinaCalling Ms. Haley the “most outspoken candidate on the growing China threat,” the website claims that “DeSantis falsely attacks Nikki Haley’s record on China.”There have indeed been distortions: Mr. DeSantis claimed that Ms. Haley gave a Chinese company land near a military base, referring to a fiberglass company. But while Ms. Haley celebrated the company’s opening of a plant in South Carolina, and although the state provided a grant for improving the site, it was the county government — not the state — that provided the land as part of a deal to secure hundreds of jobs.But it’s worth noting that the flawed attacks have gone both ways.For example, a pro-Haley super PAC wrongly claimed that Mr. DeSantis “voted to fast-track Obama’s Chinese trade deals.” That claim was based on a vote Mr. DeSantis took as a congressman in 2015 to extend the president’s authority to fast-track trade legislation (he was among 190 Republicans in the House to vote for it). No trade agreements subject to that authority were made with China. More

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      A Convicted Criminal as the Nominee? Trump’s Rivals Avoid Even Raising It

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      The former president’s legal jeopardy offers an obvious line of attack for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but fearing voter blowback, that cudgel remains largely unused.It is an obvious line of attack that has been creeping into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday — if nominated to be the Republican Party’s White House standard-bearer, the former president could very well be a convicted criminal by Election Day.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida inched toward that cudgel at a debate on Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing D.C. jury” is likely to sit in judgment of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and asking, “What are the odds that he’s going to get through that?”Then, he added, “what are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be about Jan. 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been far more reluctant to broach his legal troubles, speaking almost daily of Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disarray” without explicitly mentioning the 91 felony counts looming against him.But perhaps taking their cues from voters leery of attacks on the former president, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: conviction.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, left, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina have continued to avoid using one word: conviction.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFor the Republican Party, the reality of Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy is inescapable, and was underscored on Tuesday when he left the Iowa campaign trail to attend courthouse arguments on whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions taken as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his indictments for subverting the 2020 election, mishandling highly classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, one of those cases could go to trial before the election.And a conviction by a jury of his peers after a widely publicized trial could land differently than the indictments themselves, which were dismissed by Mr. Trump and most of his rivals as political efforts by Democrats to interfere with the presidential election.“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one felony count,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor still pursuing his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. “That puts the Republican Party in jeopardy: a flawed nominee, a historical precedent of a nominee convicted of a felony, and then a loss” in the general election.That might sound like a potent argument for Mr. Trump’s more prominent foes, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were awaiting Ms. Haley when both expressed doubts about the charges facing Mr. Trump. They supported the decisions of Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis to steer clear.“I really do believe if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided about her choice of candidates.Voters waited for Ms. Haley to speak at Mikey’s Irish Pub in Waukee, Iowa, on Thursday. Polling shows that a growing number of Mr. Trump’s supporters would not want him to be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSteph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity spent on Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.“What I love about Nikki is she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, “we all reverted back to the middle school playground, beating people up and being bullies. We don’t need more of that.”Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was certain a conviction would only bolster Mr. Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.But that is not what polling shows. Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. Some 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and 23 percent of his supporters said in December that they believed he had committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.“When you put it that way, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Ms. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted Mr. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”On Wednesday, at a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, was awaiting the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Still undecided, she conceded she was not well-versed in the cases arrayed against Mr. Trump, but she was not willing to dismiss them.“It just seems like there’s a lot there,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied up, but I am worried.”Still, it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates who were most ready to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — were seeing single digits or worse in national polling of Republican primary voters before Mr. Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey suspended his candidacy for president during an event in Windham, N.H., on Thursday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when almost all the candidates on the stage raised their hand when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted criminal.“I want you to imagine for a second if Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were frankly sitting here tonight,” he said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”Yet that conversation continues.In an interview on Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for nearly three minutes: “He’s innocent until he’s proven guilty,” she said. “He’ll have to figure that out. I don’t have to deal with those court cases.”Mr. DeSantis has been nudging toward acknowledging the danger. In an interview last month with the conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy on liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, much less Donald Trump, to get a fair shake in front of a D.C. jury,” he said.But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.“We’re taking a huge risk by empowering a jury of, probably an all-Democrat jury in the nation’s capital, the most Democrat area in the country, to pass a judgment,” he said in the NBC News interview, “because obviously if they rule against him, if they have a verdict against him, that’s going to hurt us in the election.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Winners and Losers From the Fifth Republican Debate in Iowa

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      Welcome to Opinion’s commentary for the fifth Republican presidential debate, held in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night. In this special feature, Times Opinion writers and contributors rate the candidates on a scale of 0 to 10: 0 means the candidate didn’t belong on the stage and should have dropped out before the debate even […] More