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      Asa Hutchinson, Tilting at a Trump-Branded Windmill, Hangs On

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      The former Arkansas governor, nowhere in the polls, is running on principle — and on fumes, financially speaking.Asa Hutchinson sat under the fluorescent lights of a windowless conference room just off the main convention hall at the Prairie Meadows Casino and Hotel in Altoona, Iowa, on Thursday, explaining why there was a mission to the madness of his 2024 campaign for the presidency.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey had dropped out of the race the day before, following other big names to the exits like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as not-so-big names like the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, and a conservative commentator, Larry Elder.But as Mr. Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, awaited his turn to speak at a summit on renewable fuels, he said he only found more motivation in those other departures.“My voice makes a difference,” he said. “I am the only one campaigning for president in Iowa that has said I’m not going to promise a pardon to Donald Trump. And if my voice is not there, then no one hears the alternative view.”“How in the world are you going to beat Donald Trump,” he added, “if somebody is not out there sounding the alarm that we can all go down in flames if we have the wrong nominee?”At a renewable fuels summit in Altoona, Iowa, on Thursday, Mr. Hutchinson addressed a crowd to much less fanfare than his competitors, who spoke earlier in the day.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Hutchinson, a founding leader of the Department of Homeland Security, a former chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a former member of Congress, has one more thing to add to that bulging résumé: the Don Quixote of the 2024 Republican primaries.The windmill he has been tilting at, Mr. Trump, has taken no more interest in him than Miguel de Cervantes’s inanimate behemoths did in that other dogged knight. But Mr. Trump’s stolid march toward the Republican nomination is what keeps Mr. Hutchinson going, on long drives with his two staff members, through snowstorms that grounded other candidates, to events where only a handful of people showed up, each of whom might well caucus on Monday for Mr. Hutchinson, he believes, if he can only make his pitch.“I’m not blind to the challenges, and that this is uphill,” he said earnestly. “I know where I am today, and I know what my goals are for next Monday. Then, when it’s over with, we’re going to evaluate it.”What money he has scraped together has paid the candidate filing fees in Colorado, Michigan, Texas and Oklahoma. He is skipping South Carolina — no point competing there, he said — but he is ready to contest Florida, because by its primary on March 19, Mr. Trump may well be on trial in Washington on felony charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.“The voters are going to have a lot more information post-March 4 on the risk of a Trump candidacy,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s trial, which is scheduled to begin one day before Super Tuesday, though even Mr. Hutchinson conceded that the trial date was likely to slip.For now, Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign defines living off the land. He had raised all of $1.2 million through September and spent $924,015 of it, a pittance compared with the pocketbooks of other candidates. He cut one television ad, he said. It hasn’t aired much.Where others fly, he drives — long distances. Aides say he has been known to drive the eight-plus hours to Des Moines from Arkansas by himself in his own car. Travel is in the cheapest S.U.V.s on offer at the rental counters. Last fall, when a flight from Chicago to Des Moines was canceled, he rounded up three strangers, pooled their money to rent a car and drove to Iowa for his scheduled events.But he has a flight booked to New Hampshire on Tuesday, after what he hopes will be a better-than-expected showing in Iowa on Monday.“You’re the media, so you tell me what the expectations are for me,” he said.“One, 2 percent?” his interlocutor ventured.“OK,” he said. “So that’s the expectations I have to beat.”Mr. Hutchinson had raised just $1.2 million through September, a pittance compared with other candidates.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFor a man determined to sound the alarm and save the republic, he has kept expectations remarkably low.Although he says his voice matters, the story he tells to illustrate the impact he has made doesn’t exactly drive home that idea: Last June, he said, he ventured to Columbus, Ga., for that state’s Republican convention, so packed with Trump-supporting delegates that Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, steered clear, still feeling the wrath of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers who were upset at Mr. Kemp for refusing to overturn President Biden’s narrow victory there in 2020.Mr. Hutchinson tore into Mr. Trump in his quiet way, happy to brave the crowd. Then a man in a red MAGA hat rushed up to him afterward “and he said, ‘You didn’t fully persuade me, but at least I like you now,” Mr. Hutchinson recalled, smiling.With that, he left for his speech, wading through the trade show hallway, with its industry booths promoting ethanol production and carbon dioxide pipelines, candy bars in bowls to lure conventioneers, Fleetwood Mac piping through the sound system.The audience, maybe three-quarters full, listened respectfully. When he told the crowd that he was the only Republican candidate refusing to pardon Mr. Trump, a single clap rang out.That clapper, William Sherman, a retiree from the Beaverdale neighborhood of Des Moines, was more than happy to share his feeling.“What he said made sense,” Mr. Sherman said. But he would not be caucusing for Mr. Hutchinson: “I’m a Democrat.” More

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      Who benefits as Christie ends presidential bid before Iowa caucus? – podcast

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      Hours before Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis took to the debate stage in Iowa on Wednesday night, more than 1,000 miles away in New Hampshire Chris Christie shocked his supporters by announcing he was dropping out of the race. The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate to consistently attack Donald Trump, in a field of Republicans trying to beat the former president, all the while keeping his base sweet.
      With only three days until the Iowa caucus, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Elaine Kamarck about who is most likely to come out on top

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Iowa Pastors Say Video Depicting Trump as Godly Is ‘Very Concerning’

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      A viral video praising former President Donald J. Trump has offended a key Iowa constituency in the lead-up to next week’s critical Iowa caucuses: faith leaders.The video, which Mr. Trump first posted to Truth Social last Friday and then played before taking the stage at several rallies in Iowa over the weekend, is called “God Made Trump.” In starkly religious, almost messianic tones, it depicts the former president as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation.“God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” begins the video, which appears to use artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Paul Harvey, a conservative radio broadcaster who died in 2009. Mr. Trump, it adds, “is a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.”Since the video was posted, it has been widely shared, racked up millions of views and drawn a lot of attention. But much of that attention has been negative, particularly among Iowa’s pastors, some of whom said they were shocked and offended by the content.“It was very concerning,” said Pastor Joseph Brown of the Marion Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, Iowa, a town of 7,500 people about 40 minutes south of Iowa City. He took issue, he said, with how it used language plucked from the Bible — such as describing Mr. Trump’s arms as “strong” yet “gentle” — to compare Mr. Trump directly to God, rather than a servant of a higher power.“The original sin of Satan or Lucifer is not that he wanted to take over God’s position but that he wanted to be like God. There is only one god, and it’s not Trump or any other man,” said Mr. Brown, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but says he will not this year.The opinions of religion leaders like Mr. Brown carry considerable weight in Iowa. More than three-quarters of the state’s population identifies as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center, and 28 percent of the population describes themselves as evangelicals — both measures are well above the national average. What’s more, the preponderance of voters in Iowa primary elections have historically been evangelicals.Mr. Trump, who rarely attends church, has nonetheless managed to gain the support of a large swath of the nation’s faithful — particularly less traditional, non-churchgoing Christians. But the cohort has not universally embraced him.A high-profile example came in November, when the Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats endorsed one of his rivals in the primary race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.For pastors like Darran Whiting of Liberty Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, who say they would never vote for Mr. Trump, the video only underscores why.“God has ordained servant leadership, not the arrogant, self-serving righteous leadership that particular video portrays,” said Mr. Whiting, who plans to vote for Mr. DeSantis. He noted that while Mr. Trump’s campaign did not make the video, the former president’s decision to share it speaks to his endorsement of its message.The clip’s authors are members of the Dilley Meme Team, an organized collective of video producers who call themselves “Trump’s Online War Machine.” The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, describes himself as Christian and a man of faith, but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He has said that Mr. Trump has “God-tier genetics” and, in response to outcry over the “God Made Trump” video, he posted a meme depicting Mr. Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.Other members of the meme team frequently express religious faith, and one, a musician named Michael Beatty, has recorded several albums of original Christian songs. Multiple passages in “God Made Trump” hew closely to language from the Bible, and they are delivered in a voice that sounds nearly identical to Mr. Harvey’s when he spoke at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention. That speech was called “So God Made a Farmer.”A different oratory by Mr. Harvey, 1965’s “If I Were the Devil,” is the seeming inspiration for another video created by the Dilley Meme Team that went viral last summer. Called “If I Were the Deep State,” it also features a voice-over that sounds like Mr. Harvey, a symbol of Midwestern practically and old-fashioned conservative values, in this case delivering ominous lines about fraudulent elections, corrupt prosecutors and the medical establishment.“If I was the Deep State, you would fear to ever resist me,” the video intones. “If I was the Deep State, you would wish I was really the devil.” 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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      Biden Campaign to Send Top Allies to Iowa to Spread Democrats’ Message

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      Iowa is dominated by Republicans right now. The events by presidential candidates are for Republicans, the voters who come to see them are Republicans and the main event, Monday’s caucuses, will feature Republicans.But Democrats will try to get in on the action on Monday, when President Biden’s campaign is expected to dispatch some of its biggest surrogates to Iowa to make the party’s case in the hours before Republicans gather to vote.These allies include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign; Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who is a member of the campaign’s national advisory board; and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. They are planning to appear at a news conference in downtown Des Moines on Monday afternoon shortly before the caucuses begin, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s scheduling.Mr. Katzenberg is a longtime Democratic megadonor who has taken on his largest political role to date with the Biden campaign, serving as a conduit to big donors while assuming a role of publicly calming worries about Mr. Biden’s fund-raising, staffing and political vulnerabilities.Mr. Pritzker, America’s wealthiest elected official, is organizing this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ms. Smith, who represents a neighboring state, is in her first full term as senator.“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ all-out assault on democracy and Americans’ personal freedoms will be front and center as Iowans begin to caucus Monday,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “The Biden campaign will be on the ground, talking directly to voters and reminding everyone that President Biden is fighting to ensure MAGA Republicans’ extreme, out-of-touch agenda continues to lose at the ballot box.” 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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      Nikki Haley emerges from TV debate as Trump’s nearest rival as Iowa vote looms

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      The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley emerged from the last televised debate before the Iowa caucuses clearly Donald Trump’s strongest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, boosted by the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate to register significantly with voters.Voting begins in Iowa on Monday, before New Hampshire stages its primary a week on Tuesday. Haley has closed on Trump in New Hampshire and has hopes of seizing second place in Iowa at the expense of the rightwing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Nonetheless, the Trump camp remains bullish as the Iowa vote looms after having maintained hefty leads in the polls for months. On Wednesday night, one senior aide said the campaign “couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves” events in the Des Moines debate, delighting in the spectacle of the former US president’s rivals slogging it out on the CNN stage while Trump – who continues to refuse to debate – took an easy ride at a Fox News town hall.“If you watched any part of the ‘JV’ debate this evening, you see two campaigns that are beating the living hell out of each other,” Chris LaCivita told reporters after Haley fiercely debated DeSantis, while Trump performed on his own elsewhere.“Then you have a Donald Trump commercial that shows up and he’s talking about Joe Biden … we couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves.”“JV” stands for “junior varsity” – a designation for college athletes below first-team standard. At Drake University, Haley said, “I wish Donald Trump was up on this stage” but spent most of her evening fighting DeSantis, regardless of Trump’s whopping Iowa lead.Fox gave Trump an easy ride. On a network which has paid $787.5m to settle one lawsuit arising from his stolen election lie and faces other such threats, the subject never came up. Nor did Trump’s legal problems arising from that lie, including 17 criminal charges regarding election subversion. Nor were Trump’s other 74 criminal charges, for retention of classified information and hush-money payments, high on Fox’s agenda.Tim Miller, a Republican operative turned anti-Trump activist and writer for the Bulwark, a conservative Never-Trump website, delivered a withering assessment of the Fox News town hall.Describing “one big primetime infomercial for the frontrunner”, Miller described Trump’s hosts, the “‘straight news’ reporters Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum”, sitting “beside the disgraced former president listening to his Catskills stand-up bit and giggling like a couple of undergrads after a 5mg weed gummy”.Trump did not avoid every pitfall. Seeking to thread a particularly tricky needle, he questioned the harshness of abortion bans supported by Haley and DeSantis. But he also crowed that “for 54 years, [conservatives] were trying to get Roe v Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it”.The remark drew applause from the Fox audience but delight from Democrats, given how the supreme court’s removal of the federal right to abortion last year (actually 49 years after Roe, the ruling which guaranteed the right) and other attacks on healthcare rights have fueled Democratic wins at the polls. Up and down the ballot, abortion is set to be a key election issue this year.Tommy Vietor, a former staffer to Barack Obama, posted Trump’s remark to social media and said: “Biden campaign is going to feature this in about a billion dollars’ worth of ads.”DeSantis, meanwhile, has spent hundreds of millions on his campaign but is widely seen to be in deep trouble, needing a strong second in Iowa to avoid having to drop out. He also stood to lose more than Haley from Christie’s decision earlier on Wednesday to bring an end to his own campaign.The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate to run on an explicitly anti-Trump platform, regardless of Trump’s hold on Republican voters.Ending his campaign in New Hampshire, the libertarian-minded state on which he pinned his hopes, Christie said: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that [Trump] is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.”Haley and DeSantis have begun to attack Trump as caucus day looms but not in strong terms and while still reserving their harshest fire for each other. Christie also had harsh if unscripted words for both his rivals, in comments apparently picked up by accident on a hot mic before his speech was streamed.“She’s gonna get smoked and you and I both know it,” Christie said, presumably referring to Haley. “She’s not up to this.”He also said: “DeSantis called me, petrified that I would –” before the audio cut out.The remarks, which CNN confirmed were directed at Wayne MacDonald, Christie’s New Hampshire campaign chair, pointed to harsh political realities.Haley is clear in second in New Hampshire and has been reducing Trump’s lead. Most polling indicates Christie supporters will now turn her way. But Haley remains well behind Trump, particularly in her own state, South Carolina, which will be third to vote. Campaign wisdom says candidates who cannot win their home state cannot hope to win over their whole party.DeSantis is well behind Trump in Florida and everywhere else. He would certainly have reason to be “petrified” that Christie’s withdrawal will ensure Haley becomes the only competitor to Trump with any notion of viability at all.The DeSantis and Haley campaigns did not immediately comment. More