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      Trump’s Iowa win marks a comeback for him and a step backwards for the country

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      Arwa Mahdawi: an incredible comeback for TrumpThe Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who was in Iowa on Monday night as a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign, may have summed up the night the best. “Tonight’s contest,” Pritzker said, “is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging, or with high heels or lifts in their boots”.There were no meaningful differences between the three frontrunners (Trump, Ron “rumoured to wear leg-lengthening lifts” DeSantis, and Nikki Haley). And, in the end, Iowa, as was much predicted, went for the original packaging – by a landslide.So does this mean Trump is a shoo-in for the Republican nominee? Not necessarily. There have been numerous instances where the winner of the Iowa caucus isn’t the eventual nominee – including 2016, when Ted Cruz won. Still, Trump’s victory on Monday night makes it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. And this, let us not forget, is despite the fact that Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four separate cases covering everything from conspiring to overturn the 2020 election to falsifying records in connection to hush money paid to an adult film star. Oh, and let’s not forget that last year a New York jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. However, it seems none of that is a deal-breaker for the Republican voters in Iowa.All in all? Monday night marked an incredible comeback for the disgraced former president and an enormous step backwards for the country.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
      Lloyd Green: ‘Nikki Haley is too out of touch to win’Donald Trump romped to victory in the Iowa caucus. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis vie for a distant second. Haley may best Trump in next week’s New Hampshire primary, but she won’t derail him. Her candidacy is a magnet for disaffected Republicans and high-end independents, constituencies too small to matter in this year’s nominating process but who may determine the outcome of the general election.She is the wine-track candidate in a Joe Six-pack Republican party, out of step with the party’s working-class and white evangelical base. Her backers emphatically oppose a national six-week abortion ban, which Iowa Republicans embrace. In a similar vein, a majority of Haley voters believe Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020, placing them at odds with the rest of caucusgoers.As ever, class and culture count. Haley nearly matched Trump with college graduates. By contrast, she only eked out the support of one in eight voters without a four-year degree. Jesus and Nascar get you the “W” in Trump-centric Iowa. Pearls and garden parties, not so much.Looking ahead, a Trump loss in New Hampshire would be a mere speed bump. In 2000, George W Bush won Iowa, slipped in New Hampshire, then rallied in South Carolina. He never looked back. This year, Haley trails Trump by nearly 30 points in South Carolina, her home.Meanwhile, the 45th president’s legal woes remain the soundtrack of 2024’s political calendar. In the coming hours, his latest defamation trial will kick off in Manhattan. His sexual assault of E Jean Carroll haunts decades later.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Trump will remain unstoppable’Of course Donald Trump won big today. He’s running for the candidacy of a Republican party that he’s all but created.Some in the Trump 2016 campaign such as Steve Bannon wanted to realign American politics in a new way: to win so decisively among (particularly white) working-class voters to permanently change the electoral map. For the moment, at least, they failed in their ambitions. Rhetoric and disregard for institutional order aside, on the policy front Trump governed more like a business Republican and less like populist firebrand. But it’s clear that he did permanently change the Republican party.Trump’s style – his personal attacks on opponents, railings against establishment media, attacks on the “deep state” and the election system itself – all built on existing trends within the Republican party, but he took them to new extremes and made personal loyalty to his brand a litmus test in the party.He’s done to his party something very unusual in American politics. Instead of hobbling together a loose coalition like Joe Biden, Trump made the Republicans a coherent, largely unified entity, bound together by a worldview and a leader.Iowa’s results make it plainly clear that Trump will remain unstoppable in Republican primaries unless he’s kept off ballots by the courts. Outside of the judicial system there is no elite media or RNC cabal nearly strong enough to defeat him.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
      Ben Davis: ‘This is a race in name only’The Iowa caucuses show what we all knew: this year’s Republican primary is a race in name only. Trump’s landslide victory felt inevitable and was even bigger than most expected. He was able to win without participating in debates or even running much of a primary-focused campaign, preferring to act as if he was already the nominee.Most Americans are barely aware there’s even a primary race going on. Caucus turnout plummeted since 2016. It is hard to imagine a scenario where Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. He’s already led a coup attempt, been indicted with dozens of counts of various felonies and even compared his own views on immigrants to Hitler’s. It hasn’t hurt his standing with Republicans at all.While the Iowa caucuses, with their social pressure, heavily white and evangelical electorate, and brutal negative temperatures, are particularly friendly to Trump, there’s very little chance he has to break a sweat to win the nomination. Under the hood, the caucus results show the Republican base is still divided and changing.In heavily college-educated areas, Trump’s vote share plummeted. While this matters little in the Republican primary, it’s a sign that Trump could still struggle to win even Republican-leaning voters in the general election in highly educated areas. These are voters who, unlike millions of others, still haven’t been alienated enough to stop caucusing in the Republican primary, and even still, they reject Trump. It remains to be seen if the unpopular Biden can do enough to win these voters back over.This primary race that never took off serves as yet another rebuke of the wealthy elites in the Republican party, who have used the party as a vehicle to promote market-friendly policy above all else. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Ron DeSantis campaign, and the results were a spectacular failure. It’s not their party anymore. The Republican party is now a vehicle primarily for the politics of cultural grievance and petty reaction.
      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
      Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘It’s impossible to out-Trump Trump’Anyone surprised by Donald Trump’s blowout victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses shouldn’t have been. The other candidates’ failure to criticize him in any meaningful way amounted to a pre-emptive surrender to his brand of populism, and the election results showed that it’s impossible to out-Trump Trump. In fact, dislodging Trump was always going to be enormously difficult because he has remade not only the Republican party but Republican voters themselves.Trump lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 – finishing behind Ted Cruz and barely ahead of Marco Rubio – because enough voters still believed in other versions of the Republican party, whether represented by the muscular internationalism and sunny optimism of a Ronald Reagan or the pious evangelicalism and fiscal austerity of a Mike Pence. Now Trump has persuaded a critical mass of those same voters to reject the beliefs they once held, on issues ranging from free trade to international alliances to constitutional democracy. Many would deny they ever believed otherwise.In hindsight, Ron DeSantis might have been a more formidable contender if he’d made a stronger claim to represent conservative competence in government; Nikki Haley for her part might have more forcefully argued against Maga isolationism. But they only could have displaced Trump by demanding that Republicans reject him along with much of what he stands for – by arguing for example that his election denialism and role in the January 6 insurrection made him unfit for office.But that would have risked splitting the party, and Trump is the only figure in the Republican party who has been willing to take that risk – perhaps because he understands that absolute control over a thing derives from a willingness to utterly destroy it, to paraphrase Frank Herbert’s Dune. Perhaps Trump also understands the other candidates better than they understand themselves. As he is reported to have said of other would-be challengers and holdouts in the Republican party: “They always bend the knee.”
      Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy drops out of race for 2024 US Republican presidential nomination

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the youthful entrepreneur who briefly threatened to disrupt the Republican primaries, has suspended his campaign for president, his team said on Monday after disappointing results in the Iowa caucuses.“As of this moment we are going to suspend this presidential campaign”, Ramaswamy said. “There’s no path for me to be the next president absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”Ramaswamy’s withdrawal from the race comes after the 38-year-old failed to build on a strong start to his campaign in a state where he spent significant money and time hoping to gain traction.Virtually unknown before he announced his run for president, Ramaswamy rose to third place in national polls over the summer, amid a slew of appearances on cable news.His popularity, including in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire declined since then, as Donald Trump maintained his convincing lead, and voters gravitated toward candidates with more political experience.Addressing supporters in Iowa on Monday evening, Ramaswamy endorsed Trump. “As I’ve said since the beginning, there are two America first candidates in this race and I called Donald Trump to tell him that.”“I congratulated him on his victory and now going forward he will have my full endorsement for the presidency, and I think we’re gonna do the right thing for this country.”Ramaswamy is scheduled to appear at a Trump campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday.Ramaswamy, who made millions of dollars in a career in the biotech industry, became one of the most visible candidates through media appearances and a relentless engagement in culture wars.As the youngest person running for the Republican nomination, and as a son of Indian immigrants, he stood out in a field traditionally populated by older white men. In spite of being the only millennial in the GOP race, he often sought to present himself even further to the right than some of his older Republican rivals.Over the course of his campaign Ramaswamy claimed that the “climate change agenda” was a “hoax”, and said he would increase fossil fuel production, while he also supported a six-week, state-mandated ban on abortion.He was a hardliner on immigration, and said he would “universally” deport all undocumented immigrants – of whom there are believed to be 10 million living in the US – while promising to admit “darn close to zero” refugees.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also suggested sending the US military into Mexico to tackle drug cartels, and said that as president he would cut aid to Ukraine and encourage the country to cede much of east Ukraine to Russia.During his campaign, Ramaswamy became increasingly critical of the Republican party as he sought to stress the differences between himself and candidates who had a longer association with the GOP.“We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said during the third Republican primary debate in November.He blamed Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the GOP, for the party losing, or underperforming, in elections since 2017.Yet throughout his campaign, Ramaswamy was far less inclined to criticize Trump, who has been the de facto head of the Republican party across those electoral defeats.Ramaswamy declared that Trump was the best president of the 21st century, and pledged to pardon him if he were elected. More

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      Iowa caucuses 2024 live: Trump ramps up attacks on Haley and DeSantis as voters battle cold to pick Republican candidate

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      It’s a bracing day in Iowa as the caucus gatherings approach later on Monday, and there are other items of US politics news occurring too, all brought to you as they happen. We are here, live, to bring you all the events.Here’s where things stand:
      Economy, border, foreign policy are key issues as Iowans head to caucus, with Republican voters in the Hawkeye state saying these themes are top of mind as they prepare to caucus tonight in the US’s first nominating contest.
      Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis on the morning of the day Iowans go to vote on their Republican candidate.
      The Pentagon said the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has been released from hospital today. Austin, 70, had been hospitalized since 1 January due to complications after prostate cancer treatment, but there was uproar because he didn’t tell the White House (or many others) about it.
      Iowa Republicans will brave brutally cold temperatures on Monday evening to participate in the state’s presidential caucuses, as Donald Trump remains the clear frontrunner in the race for his party’s nomination. The final results will depend on turnout, which could be acutely impacted by the weather.
      Iowans have been told to “limit outdoor exposure” as much as possible with forecasters saying the wind chill temperature could go down to as low as -35F on Monday evening in the “dangerous cold”.
      The 2024 US presidential election begins in earnest in Iowa today. The final Des Moines Register/NBC News poll before Monday night’s caucuses found former president, Donald Trump, maintaining a formidable lead over his opponents, supported by 48% of likely caucus-goers. After trailing the two-term Florida governor, Ron DeSantis for months, the latest poll showed Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, in second place in Iowa, winning the support of 20% of likely Republican caucus-goers, compared to DeSantis’s 16%, with Vivek Ramaswamy at 8%.
      Donald Trump Jr and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are running very late for a campaign stop at a bar in Ankeny, Iowa. “Do you think we’ll still make it to the caucus?” one anxious supporter asked the Guardian.Patiently hanging on is Blake Marnell, 59, who works in sales and lives in San Diego, California. He is one of the peculiar characters thrown up by the Trump era: he is wearing his trademark brick-patterned suit, a symbol of his support for Trump’s border wall, along with a “Maga” cap signed by Trump.He says the suit was marketed in Britain for stag parties and he bought it off the internet. “These are suits made for bachelor parties in London where the lads all want to go out for a night drinking but the dress code at the club says you must wear suits, so there’s this industry of semi-disposable suits with garish patterns.”Marnell estimates he has been to between 35 and 40 Trump rallies and confidently predicts the former president will win the Iowa caucuses. “I believe President Trump will win. I think everybody knows that so the real question is by how much? If you go by polling, I think that he will be over 50%.”The “Brick Man” is also looking forward to seeing the president’s eldest son in action soon. “He’s an excellent speaker for President Trump, for his father, because one thing that a lot of President Trump’s surrogates don’t have but Donald Trump Jr does have is they share the same sense of humour: at times irreverent, at times offensive to some people, at times perhaps people might think it’s a little bit too much, but if you’re a fan of President Trump and his humour, you’re also going to be a fan of Don Jr.“The politician that supports President Trump won’t have the freedom or the latitude to say things because they have to worry about their constituency back home and how that impacts their office. Donald Trump Jr? No filters. He can say what he wants to say. He can say what he’s feeling and people understand that and they gravitate towards him.”Vice-President Kamala Harris said “freedom is under profound threat” in a speech in South Carolina to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr Day.The vice-president spoke as Republicans campaigned around Iowa in the final push to sway voters before the caucus began this evening. Democrats aren’t holding an Iowa caucus this year, after shifting their calendar to make South Carolina the first official primary because Iowa and New Hampshire’s voters don’t represent the diversity of the party. Republicans set their Iowa caucus on MLK day to maintain its status as the first election contest, but the fact that it was a federal holiday didn’t seem to enter into the decision.Harris cited MLK’s iconic “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, where the civil rights leader wrote that “the goal of America is freedom”.“And so, as we gather to honor his legacy, I pose a question I believe Dr. King would today ask: In 2024, where exactly is America in our fight for freedom?…As Vice President of the United States, I’d say: At this moment, in America, freedom is under profound threat,” she said.Speaking at an NAACP event, Harris sought to make the case that supporting Democrats in this year’s elections would protect freedoms in the wake of attacks on reproductive rights, book bans and voting rights. She implored attendees to join the fight against these restrictions by voting blue in 2024.“This generation now has fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers,” she said. “It is not hypothetical that from kindergarten to 12th grade, this generation has had to endure active shooter drills. Our children, who should be in a classroom fulfilling their God-given potential and exploring their wonder for the beauty of the world, instead have to worry that someone might burst through their classroom door with a gun. It is not hypothetical. When students go to vote, they often have to wait in line for hours because of laws that intentionally make it more difficult for them to cast a ballot.”Shortly after that, the Biden campaign’s press conference wrapped up.We’re now four hours away from the start of the Republican caucuses in Iowa’s 99 counties, and you can expect the Biden campaign will speak up again once their choice becomes clear.JB Pritzker was asked about Joe Biden’s persistent unpopularity.The president’s approval rating has been underwater for more than two-and-a-half years, and has lately lurked in the low 40% range. The factors behind this trend are myriad and include Biden’s advanced age as well as the hangover from the record inflation Americans experienced in 2022, but the trend has been enough to make many Democrats nervous about his bid to win another four years in the White House.Pritzker argued that polls don’t yet reflect the reality of the presidential race, since the Republican nominee hasn’t yet been decided.“Until we see that we won’t know really what the numbers are,” the governor said (though many pollsters have surveyed how the president would perform against various Republicans, including Donald Trump, who some polls have found voters prefer.)
      But I can tell you this, that it’s Joe Biden that’s delivered for the American public, it’s Joe Biden that’s got an awful lot to brag about, and I think the dangers that are posed by this Republican field will be well known to people once … one of them is chosen.
      Jeffrey Katzenberg, a movie mogul who is co-chairing the national advisory board for Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, is talking up the mammoth fundraising haul the president received in the final quarter of last year.“Last quarter, Team Biden Harris raised more than $97m and reported $117m of cash on hand,” Katzenberg said.
      It means team Biden-Harris is entering the election year with more cash on hand than any democratic candidate in history.
      He said the Biden campaign’s financial firepower now dwarfs his Republican rivals, no matter who that may be, and allows them to focus their efforts on winning the November general election. Katzenberg said:
      Republicans are spending money in a race for the Maga base without a single dime going towards the voters who will ultimately decide the general election. By the time they are finished with the primary and Donald Trump or whichever extremists is finally in a position where they can start trying to compete with us, it’s just going to be too late.
      The Minnesota senator Tina Smith laid into the Republican field, saying all the candidates had plans to cut off access to abortion.
      We know one thing for sure. Every one of these extremist candidates is attacking women’s freedom to make their own decisions about abortion. These extreme Republican candidates want a national ban on abortion, and that is what they will try to do if given the chance.
      The reality is that none of these candidates trust women to make their own decisions about abortion because they believe that they know and that is why we cannot trust them to be president.
      The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, is up at the podium first, and saying that all Republican candidates competing in tonight’s caucus are ignoring the country’s needs and espousing extremist policies. Pritzker said:
      Here we stand on Martin Luther King Jr Day, and this field of candidates is espousing Adolf Hitler’s ideas, denying that … the civil war was about slavery, or demonizing and discounting the rights of large groups of Americans. All of these Republican candidates are singing the same, terrible song.
      In an apparent reference to Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and sole woman in the Republican race, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who has been accused of wearing footwear that boosts his stature, Pritzker said:
      Tonight’s contest is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging with high heels, or with lifts in their boots.
      While everyone will be watching who Iowa Republicans select as their nominee tonight, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is in town to, in their words, “remind voters what’s at stake this November as Donald Trump and Maga Republicans launch an all-out assault on Americans’ freedoms”.They’ve got some Democratic heavy hitters speaking to the press this afternoon at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, including the Illinois governor JB Pritzker, the Minnesota senator Tina Smith and Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign’s national advisory board.I am in the room and will let you know what they have to say.Precinct captains in Iowa will try to persuade caucus voters tonight to pick their preferred candidate, a practice common to the Iowa caucuses but not typical of US elections otherwise.Candidates work to have volunteer caucus captains at all precinct voting sites, usually local schools or community gathering places. Those captains whip votes at the precinct, speechifying and debating with voters who are unsure who to vote for or could be swayed from one candidate to another.Outside the caucus process, it’s usually illegal to actively campaign at a polling site.This year, Trump’s precinct captains are donning white hats with “Trump Caucus Captain” written in gold lettering. The hats were given to 2,000 caucus captains and have become “the hottest item in Maga world”, Politico reported.The precinct captains, while their role is important on caucus day, are typically regular Iowa voters who volunteer to help their preferred candidate because they’re passionate about that person winning. They’re often seen as people who can influence their neighbors at the hyperlocal precinct sites.Sometimes, the New York Times writes in its feature about caucus captains, the captains can be more high-profile. “One of Ron DeSantis’s captains is a former co-chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, and one of Nikki Haley’s is a state senator,” the paper notes.Climate activists from the Sunrise Movement protested outside a diner near Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where Nikki Haley was addressing supporters today. More

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      US election season begins as Iowa Republicans brave cold in first caucuses

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      Iowa Republicans will brave brutally cold temperatures on Monday evening to participate in the state’s presidential caucuses, as Donald Trump remains the clear frontrunner in the race for his party’s nomination.The caucuses, set to begin at 7pm CT, mark the first round of voting in the 2024 presidential primary. They will offer the most tangible insight yet into whether any of Trump’s primary opponents, particularly the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have managed to diminish his significant polling advantage in the race. Trump has maintained that advantage for months, even as he has been charged with 91 felony counts across four criminal cases.Despite his legal liabilities, Trump still appears well ahead of his fellow Republican candidates in Iowa. According to the latest Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll, Trump has the support of 48% of likely Republican caucus-goers, putting him nearly 30 points ahead of Haley at 20%. DeSantis trailed in third place, winning the support of 16% of likely caucus-goers. The other three Republican candidates – the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and the businessman Ryan Binkley – languished in the single digits.If polls are accurate, Trump may secure the largest margin of victory in the history of the Iowa Republican caucuses by outperforming Bob Dole’s 13-point win in 1988. The Iowa Republican party announced that it will post results online for the state’s 99 counties.On Monday, the candidates held last-minute events to whip up voters and hopefully increase turnout despite the treacherous winter weather.Trump, for his part, attacked his GOP rivals. He called Haley a “globalist Rino” (Republican in name only) and DeSantis “Maga-lite” and said votes for Ramaswamy were “wasted”.“Nikki is a Globalist RINO, backed by American’s for Chinese Growth, the Charles Koch con job. It’s not going to happen for her, or DeSanctimonious! Vivek Votes are wasted, should come to ‘TRUMP.’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Iowa voters said their top issues were the economy, border security and foreign policy. Despite fears for the future of democracy, Trump supporters said they still believed the 2020 election was stolen and the court cases against Trump would backfire. Polls showed that Trump support could grow if he is indicted. But supporters of other candidates in the Republican contest said they were sick of Trump’s chaos and wanted to move forward.Some voters were still undecided on Monday, and attended events to hear from candidates they might vote for. Caucus captains who volunteer to whip votes for their preferred candidates will work to sway voters to their side at precincts throughout the state on Monday night, a unique feature of Iowa’s caucus (and one typically illegal at polling places in other states).The final results will depend on turnout, which could be acutely impacted by the weather. After a blizzard swept through Iowa on Friday, many roads remained covered in snow as temperatures dropped well below freezing. Trump acknowledged on Saturday that he was concerned about the weather affecting caucus turnout but expressed confidence in his supporters’ dedication.“It’s going to be cold. It’s not going to be pleasant,” DeSantis said at a campaign event in West Des Moines on Saturday. “If you’re willing to brave the elements and be there for the couple hours that you have to be there, if you’re willing to do that and you’re willing to fight for me on Monday night, then as president I’ll be fighting for you for the next eight years.”Even as the National Weather Service warned of “life-threatening” cold, Iowa voters largely shrugged off questions about how they would reach their caucus sites.“People in the country live like this all the time,” said Abbey Sindt, a caucus-goer who attended Haley’s town hall in Ames on Sunday. “So it’s really not that big of a deal, in my opinion.”Max Richardson, who also attended the town hall, agreed with Sindt, saying, “Everyone’s shoveled out. Everyone’s getting the ice melt down. It’s just a question of, can you get the car there?” More

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      ‘An instrument of chaos’: Trump leads polls as Iowa Republicans weigh future of US democracy

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      As Iowa Republicans gather on Monday to choose their presidential candidate, a host of big questions surround the potential return of Donald Trump and the future of democracy in the US.Ongoing court cases against Trump, the frontrunner, loom large. Threats against elections officials and judges in Trump-related cases raise the possibility of political violence in a tense election year. For some Republican voters, the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump remains a core part of their ideology.Trump also faces the prospect of being removed from the ballot over his role in the 6 January insurrection. Legal decisions using the 14th amendment as a basis for removing the former president from the contest will be heard by the US supreme court in February.The former president has vowed to retaliate against his enemies, go after Joe Biden and his family, and weaponize the justice department for his political goals in a second term in office predicted to center around retribution.Trump’s legal liabilities and heated rhetoric are not turning off his base of voters – they remain steadfast supporters of the Maga movement and think the cases against him are part of a conspiracy to keep him out of office. For voters choosing other candidates, though, the former president’s court woes and penchant for whipping up chaos have turned them off.A poll of likely Republican caucus voters in Iowa found that 61% said their support of Trump would not be affected by a potential criminal conviction before the general election. The NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll says 19% of Republican caucus-goers in Iowa go even further – they would be more likely to back Trump if he is convicted – though 18% said the opposite.Jamie Copher, a 52-year-old Trump supporter who works in sales and marketing, voted for the first time in 2020 for Trump because he “ran this country like a business”, she said at a rally in Indianola, Iowa. She thinks Biden did not receive 81m legal votes in the 2020 election and that the election was a fraud, but she does not think the 2024 election could be stolen because “too many Americans are going to be watching”. (There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.)“I heard before that they were going to steal the 2020 election and, to be honest with you, I didn’t think any Democrat was smart enough to be able to steal an election and didn’t realise they’ve been stealing elections since pretty much before I was alive. I’ve learned a lot about the election system and I love it so I’m getting more involved locally,” she said.The potential of Trump being removed from the ballot because of the 14th amendment will not prevent Copher from voting for him.“I’m writing that man’s name in and I don’t care if he has a VP or not because I believe he never conceded. He’s still my president.”Cathy Kurtinitis, a 69-year-old Trump supporter, described January 6 as “overblown” and said the 2020 election should have been investigated more than it was, pointing out that Biden did not campaign in person much or draw the crowds Trump did.Asked if she is confident that Trump would beat Biden in 2024, Kurtinitis replied: “Apart from the machinations of the deep state, yes.”Trump’s supporters have not been put off by his language in recent months on the campaign trail, where he has vowed to be a dictator for a day after resuming office and called his political opponents “vermin”.Gary Leffler, 62, does not buy in to the notion that Trump would be a dictator. “Well, if he was going to do that he would have done it the first time, so what we say in Iowa is that’s a bunch of hogwash.”For the Republicans who are trying to avoid a Trump return, the concerns around the frontrunner are more of a turn-off. They do not like how his words tend to require clarification after the fact, though they are not always sure if he intends to incite violence or means exactly what he says. And they are looking for a future president who does not bring such baggage, which they see as a distraction, even if they also believe the 2020 election was not fair and the lawsuits are politically motivated.The former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s supporters were more likely to say a conviction would hinder their support of Trump in a general election in the NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll.Haley, seen as likely to place second in Iowa, has more crossover appeal to moderate and independent voters. Some of her supporters in Iowa said they did not believe the 2020 election was stolen and thought those involved in the insurrection were rightly held accountable, but that the court cases against Trump could backfire and only solidify his support.Jim Baker, a 61-year-old from San Diego who came to Iowa to help Haley’s campaign in the final days of the caucus, said he thought Trump lost to Biden, but that Biden had done a “poor job” as president.The 2024 election should be about finding the right person to lead the country forward, Baker said. “Donald Trump is not that person.”Still, he was not sure if the threat of political violence could come true or if it was more of Trump’s rhetoric. “There’s a lot of bark,” he said. “I don’t know how much bite there is. There’s a lot of bark. Yeah, he loves to bark and he loves to thrive on barking.”Supporters of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, supporters were less likely to turn against Trump if he is convicted compared to Haley supporters, according to the NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll.Some supporters of DeSantis, who typically polls in third place in the Republican contest, said the prospect of electing Trump again, particularly while he faces ongoing civil and criminal cases, was too risky. Some said they were tired of the Trumpian brand of politics.Kent Christen, a 53-year-old analyst from Cedar Rapids, said the former president is careless when he talks, though he did not think Trump was necessarily telling people to be violent.“I think the issue is there’s not much delta between his brain and his mouth,” Christen said. “And it’s more and more difficult these days for people to clean up his message behind him. He gives people too many opportunities. Chaos follows him. He’s like an instrument of chaos. I’m kind of tired of all that. That’s the biggest reason I’m tired of him.”Amy Christen, a Cedar Rapids special education teacher who attended a DeSantis rally this weekend, said she did not think a Trump loss would lead to political violence, but she thought the left could become violent instead.“I will definitely see violence if Biden loses. I don’t know why the left – we saw the summer of love – we saw it in Seattle, in Portland, in Kenosha, we’ve seen it in Minneapolis,” she said, referring to the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder. “They’re angry. They’re violent.” More

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      Icy battle for democracy in Iowa with Trump expected to win caucuses in an avalanche

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      A cold coming we had of it. Icy winds blow across the plains, numbing the face and cutting to the bone. Stranded cars and tractor trailers lie abandoned at the side of highways. Snow is piled high on the side of every road in the state capital, where giant icicles hang off buildings. Candidates’ yard signs and children’s playgrounds have been enveloped by a white blanket.Welcome to Iowa, often described as the centre of the political universe at this stage of the US electoral cycle, but currently feeling more like the outer reaches of our solar system.It is here, amid wind chills of around -40F (-40C), that Monday will witness the dawn of the 2024 presidential election, the first since the insurrection of 6 January 2021, when US democracy itself hung by a thread.The brutal weather has proved timely for reporters in need of something to talk about ahead of some particularly anti-climactic Iowa caucuses. Democrats are not actively engaged this time, while the Republican race has never been such a foregone conclusion: Donald Trump in an avalanche.The only suspenseful questions on what is expected to be the coldest caucus night ever are: will Trump exceed 50% of the vote and will Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, eclipse the one-time rising star Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida?A third place finish could snuff out DeSantis’s singularly joyless effort, which has come to resemble a death march in a state that demands retail politics in its purest form. At an event at his campaign office in a drab building in West Des Moines on Saturday, a Queen hit boomed out from loudspeakers: “Don’t stop me now / I’m having such a good time, I’m having a ball.”The harsh reality is that this is still Trump’s party and neither DeSantis nor Haley managed to stake out their own identity. Chuck Todd, chief political analyst at NBC News, told Meet the Press that Republicans held “robust debates” about their ideological direction in 1964, 1976 and 2016 but not in 2024.“There really isn’t a debate about whether Trumpism is the right direction for the party; the debate is about Trump,” he said. “And I think that’s probably the mistake that Haley and DeSantis – they haven’t figured out how to make the case that Trump’s first term was a failure. You may have liked the issues he focused on, but his inability to solve these problems is why we have the problems we have today. And they seem to be afraid of making that argument.”But there is also a bigger picture, a new test of institutions after years of assault by Trump and the “Make America great again” movement. The Iowa caucuses are the first stop on the long and winding road to an election that will reveal whether the twice impeached, quadruply indicted former president is a historical aberration or destination.Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and informal adviser to Joe Biden, said on the MSNBC network on Sunday: “I think the central question for American democracy at this hour is, are you willing to vote for someone with whom you may differ on policy, but in whose fealty to the constitution you do not doubt? Or do you vote for someone who has demonstrated again and again that he’ll put himself above everything else? Pretty straightforward.”Meacham worries that, after nearly 250 years, the spirit of the declaration of independence and constitution are in grave jeopardy. “I do believe that this experiment needs to go on and I just worry – and I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am given the evidence of the last, what, almost 10 years now – that a re-elected Trump would not only damage that experiment, but he damn well might end it.”There are plenty of reasons to suspect he might be right. A Trump rally at a snowy college campus Indianola on Sunday was shown a now-notorious “God Made Trump” video which claims that the former president is the Almighty’s gift to mankind. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who once said he would not do business with Trump, turned up to endorse him, foreshadowing other spineless Republicans who will surely fold. Honoured guests included the British demagogue Nigel Farage and the self-declared Islamophobe Laura Loomer.Looking on, while shepherding a visiting group of British students, was the veteran political consultant Frank Luntz. To his own surprise and dismay, he would now bet on Trump beating Biden in November. “It’s because Trump seems to be getting stronger and stronger and Biden seems to be getting weaker and weaker,” he said, sounding like Cassandra.Indeed, Trump is approaching the primary with the swagger of an incumbent but heading into the general election with some of the insurgent energy he displayed in 2016. There will be some irony if the Iowa caucuses, a flawed and fragile yet beautiful exercise in democracy in church basements and school gyms, unleash a new authoritarianism on the world. More

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      Iowa caucuses 2024: who are the Republican presidential candidates?

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      The Republican race for the 2024 presidential nomination began with a surprisingly large field but has rapidly winnowed down. Now voters are flocking to the Iowa caucuses – the first contest in the process.In a US election, Republican and Democrats hold contests in each state to decide who their nominee will be in the presidential election in November. The winner in each state gets delegates who vote at the party conventions in the summer to choose their nominee. The state elections are usually called primaries with a simple vote, but in some states the election follows a more complex, meeting-based format known as a caucus.So far the 2024 Republican race has been heavily dominated by former US president Donald Trump, who has had a strong poll lead in Iowa itself, as well as in national surveys. Many experts expect a rerun of the 2020 race with Trump facing off against Democratic incumbent Joe Biden for the White House.The trailing pack of Republican candidates has seen numerous highly regarded figures – such as former vice-president Mike Pence and South Carolina senator Tim Scott – drop out. Those remaining have now split into two distinct groups of those who are (just about) potential rivals to Trump and those who are also-rans.Here are the key candidates dueling it out in Iowa:The favoriteDonald TrumpThe former US president’s campaign to retake the White House and once again grab his party’s nomination got off to a slow start that was widely mocked. But his campaign has steadily moved into a position of dominance and never looked likely to be dislodged from that.Trump declined to attend any of the Republican debates, has used his court appearances and many legal woes as a rallying cry to mobilize his base, and has run a surprisingly well-organized campaign. His extremist rhetoric, especially around his plans for a second term and the targeting of his political enemies, has sparked widespread fears over the threat to American democracy that his candidacy represents.His political style during the campaign has not shifted from his previous runs in 2016 and 2020 and, if anything, has become more extreme. Many see this as a result of his political and legal fates becoming entwined with a return to the Oval Office being seen as Trump’s best chance of nixing his legal problems.The potential rivalsNikki HaleyThe former South Carolina governor and ex-US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump has mostly hewed a fine line between being an alternative to Trump, while not outraging his base with too much direct criticism.That has paid off as Haley has shone in debates and worked hard on the campaign trail and risen in the polls to give her a shot at coming second in Iowa and causing an upset in New Hampshire – where she is polling strongly. However, that prominence has now earned Trump’s ire and the two campaigns are openly hurling insults at each other.Ron DeSantisThe rightwing Florida governor was widely seen as the most likely rival to Trump but DeSantis has proved a disaster as a campaigner on the national stage. Positioning himself as an extreme culture warrior, DeSantis has run a campaign of hardcore rightwing politics but he himself has proved a serious turnoff to voters.He has failed to use the debate stage to break through and been subject to a brutal months-long assault from Trump and his surrogates as his stiff campaign trail style damaged his standings. The result has been a prolonged tanking in the polls and Haley has largely overtaken him as the main “non-Trump” candidate.The also-ransVivek RamaswamyThe entrepreneur and extreme Trump fan had a moment in the sun during the early debates where he briefly seemed to be emerging as someone even Trumpier than Trump – but with a younger, more dynamic candidacy. That did not last long though as his poll numbers never caught on and his extremist comments generated endless negative press. He failed to qualify for the final debate.Asa HutchinsonFormer Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson has remained in the race – but few people would really know why. He has not qualified for recent debates and is not expected to make any meaningful impression in Iowa or nationally and frequently dips below 1% in polls. Hutchinson feels like an older school pre-Trump Republican campaigning in a vastly different age from the one where he carved out a career as a traditional conservative.@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline 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      Prosecutors are charging Trump using laws made to fight the KKK. Here’s why | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      On Tuesday, in response to the federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith over Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 insurrection, Trump threatened a new round of violence – or “bedlam” – if he loses the election. In early February, the US supreme court will also rule on the Colorado supreme court’s decision to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot for his part in the insurrection.The two cases might appear to be disconnected, but they are inseparable in law and history. They are united by Congress’s Reconstruction-era action to enforce the 14th amendment’s extension of constitutional rights against the former Confederates’ campaign of racial and political violence – the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871.Smith has indicted Trump under the KKK Act, which incorporates the 14th amendment, section 3, of the constitution. The Colorado court’s disqualification comes under the third section of the amendment, which disqualifies from office anyone who has engaged in insurrection against the United States. There are clear and compelling reasons why Trump has been indicted under the KKK Act and disqualified under the 14th amendment, section 3. Those reasons are stated in the indictments and court rulings.Trump has been charged on the same grounds that Klansmen were prosecuted, not only during Reconstruction but also during the civil rights era of the 1960s, and he has been removed from the ballot on the same basis as Confederate traitors were removed from elective office. Complacent commentators have dismissed the charges that Trump has brought on himself, hoping to calm the waters by vainly demonstrating their fair-mindedness. But the law is not somnambulant forever and the historical reality underlying it cannot be erased as it was in the aftermath of the dismantling of Reconstruction in a ‘lost cause’ of false conciliation.Through the civil war amendments, the newly freed slaves began to establish themselves as citizens with equal protection under the law and the right to vote. By 1867, in 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, 80% of eligible black men had registered to vote. Blacks and whites enacted new state constitutions and elected Republicans to state and federal offices, including many African Americans. Almost at once they were subjected to a reign of terror.The Ku Klux Klan, established in 1866 and led by former Confederate officers, mobilized to deprive black Americans of their rights, and spread across the south to reimpose white supremacy. Reconstruction was subverted by a violent counterrevolution proclaimed as “Redemption”. Nearly 10% of the black delegates to those constitutional conventions were murdered.In 1867, the Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, dividing the south into five districts to be governed under the authority of Union generals. No former Confederate state could be considered legitimate or receive congressional representation until it held a democratically elected convention that adopted the 14th amendment. The Military Reconstruction Act excluded from the conventions anyone who fell under section 3 of the 14th amendment, which barred those who had taken an oath to the constitution but violated it by engaging in insurrection from holding many offices in the postwar United States.When states applied for readmittance the Congress authorized each one with legislation stating they had qualified under section 3. Four southern states – South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas and Alabama – incorporated section 3 into their new constitutions.The state of Georgia was readmitted on this basis in 1869. But as President Ulysses Grant stated in his first annual message to the Congress later that year, white Democrats in the Georgia legislature “in violation of the constitution which they had just ratified (as since decided by the supreme court of the State) … unseated the colored members of the legislature and admitted to seats some members who are disqualified by the third clause of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution – an article which they themselves had contributed to ratify”.As a result, the Congress deprived Georgia of its federal representation until members of the legislature swore an oath of eligibility or had been cleared from the disability by Congress, as stipulated by the 14th amendment. From the start, Congress’s actions made it clear that when section 3 was ratified, it came into force carrying real consequences for violations.Behind these removals and oaths was a surging Klan that staged hundreds of violent nighttime raids, lynchings, rapes, church and school burnings, and whippings of black citizens, as well as assassinations of white Republicans. The Klan is estimated to have killed anywhere from 2,500 to 20,000 people during Reconstruction.The grand dragon of the KKK, the former Confederate general John B Gordon, testified before a congressional committee to disclaim any knowledge of the Klan: “I do not know anything about any Ku Klux organization … We never called it Ku Klux, and therefore I do not know anything about Ku Klux.” By contrast, the Klan’s grand wizard, the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who ordered the massacre of black troops after their surrender during the war, explained that blacks “were becoming very insolent”, and that “this [Ku Klux Klan] was got up to protect the weak, with no political intention at all”.The KKK Act was Congress’s attempt to stamp out the Klan’s domestic terrorism. It criminalized using “force, bribery, threats, intimidation, or other unlawful means” to interfere with any citizen’s right and ability to vote.Striking at former Confederates who were commanding the Klan, the act then prescribed imprisonment of “any person who shall hereafter knowingly accept or hold any office under the United States, or any State to which he is ineligible under the third section of the fourteenth article of amendment of the Constitution of the United States … ” Under the KKK Act, Grant’s attorney general, Amos Akerman, successfully prosecuted more than 1,100 cases against members of the Klan, effectively breaking it up.In the 1872 campaign, a large faction of the national Republican party opposed the KKK Act and advocated reconciliation with the south. They called themselves the Liberal Republican party and aligned with the Democrats against Grant’s re-election. The Amnesty Act of 1872, lifting the disability of section 3, was a sop to outflank the Liberal Republicans and marked the beginning of the end of Reconstruction. Still, Grant was re-elected, winning eight southern states with a black-white coalition.Post-Klan terrorist organizations – the White League in Louisiana, the White Liners in Mississippi and the Red Shirts in South Carolina – sprang up across the South to use paramilitary force to seize state governments. The Republicans lost their House majority in 1874; Democrats cut the justice department’s budget for enforcing the KKK Act. The 1876 presidential election was decided in a literal smoked-filled room through a deal in which the Republican candidate, Rutherford B Hayes, would become president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the south.The final contemporaneous effort at an enforcement act, the Federal Elections Act of 1890, drafted by Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, would have provided US marshals to secure elections in the states, but was defeated in the Congress. In 1896, the supreme court ruling in Plessy v Ferguson upholding segregation was the capstone on a series of court decisions eviscerating Reconstruction laws. Not until Plessy was overturned in Brown v Board of Education in 1954 with the rise of the civil rights movement did the civil war amendments and their enforcement stir to life again.In 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the local police in Neshoba county, Mississippi. The justice department brought the case against 18 killers under the federal conspiracy statutes of the KKK Act before a grand jury presided over by federal judge William Harold Cox, a diehard segregationist. Cox dismissed the charges brought under section 241 of the KKK Act – a “conspiracy against rights”, extending federal criminal jurisdiction over private actors interfering with other citizens’ “free exercise of enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States”.The circuit court upheld Cox on the ground that section 241 does not include rights protected by the 14th amendment. The justice department appealed to the US supreme court, represented in the case by the solicitor general, Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the Brown case for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.On 28 March 1966, in United States v Price, et al, known as the Mississippi Burning case, the court ruled unanimously that section 241 was applicable. The decision, written by Justice Abe Fortas, reviewed the history of the civil war amendments. “We think that history leaves no doubt that, if we are to give Section 241 the scope that its origins dictate, we must accord it a sweep as broad as its language,” he wrote. “In this context, it is hardly conceivable that Congress intended Section 241 to apply only to a narrow and relatively unimportant category of rights. We cannot doubt that the purpose and effect of Section 241 was to reach assaults upon rights under the entire Constitution, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and not merely under part of it.”It is precisely under section 241 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, upheld by the supreme court in an opinion that establishes the broadest possible application, that the justice department indicted Donald Trump on 1 August 2023. The indictment was not restricted to Trump’s activities during the January 6 US Capitol riot, but to the period of his conspiracy to stage a coup, a span that began after the election to the day he left office.To wit, count 4: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States – that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”The special prosecutor then made clear that the law that Trump had violated was the pertinent section of the KKK Act: “In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241.”Trump’s indictment under the KKK Act is the core of the charges against him. To convict him, there would be no need to determine definitively whether his incitement at the White House rally on 6 January 2021 makes him responsible for the assault on the Capitol, whether he obstructed a federal procedure or his state of mind during the insurrection. He would be held accountable for his centrality in the entire broad conspiracy under section 241 – under an expansive interpretation already decided by the supreme court. Moreover, section 241 does not require an overt act in furtherance of “conspiracy against rights”, though it does require intent. It also does not require an act of violence.The 14th amendment, section 3, provides a disqualification for insurrectionists. It was a self-executing document, just as was the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. The Congress enacted a series of enforcement acts – the first and second Reconstruction Acts, and the first Civil Rights Act. As President Grant and the Congress stated in the crisis over Georgia in 1869, the only means to remove the “disability” of disqualification was by an act of the Congress as stipulated in section 3 – an amnesty. The very existence of a remedy providing for the removal of the disqualification implies that the law is self-executing, as Grant and the Congress understood.The Ku Klux Klan Act, which specifically included section 3, was a further instrument to deal with a new insurrection. During Reconstruction that section was used within the KKK Act to suppress precisely that insurrection. Grant and the Congress knew that the 14th amendment was not limited to the insurrection that forced the civil war, but also was a governing constitutional document applicable to future insurrections.None of Trump’s defenders have suggested pursuing the proper remedy that is given within section 3, namely a congressional amnesty for him. To do so would be an admission that he was guilty of engaging in an insurrection against the United States. There would be no need for an amnesty unless there was a crime. An amnesty would be analogous to a pardon. But, with flagrant irresponsibility, virtually all of the Republican presidential primary candidates have offered that they would pardon Trump. They signaled that he has committed crimes and yet must be unaccountable. Still, despite their own logic, or illogic, they avoid discussing an amnesty.A number of commentators opine that Trump must not be held to account because it would arouse his enraged followers and violate the spirit of direct democracy (never mind the spirit of the law). Others assert that liberals who speak about the rule of law are perverse elitists who, by supporting Trump’s disqualification, reveal their true contempt for the people’s will. They urge relief for Trump as a naive gesture of good faith, as if even-handedness will encourage tolerance and pluralism. In short, the mechanism for the preservation of democracy must be withheld in the name of democracy.Meanwhile, at the federal appeals court hearing on his claim that he is immune from all prosecution because he is exempt from the 14th amendment, Trump threatened that if his trials proceed, if he fails to be granted “absolute immunity”, and if he loses the election, there would be “bedlam” – yet another incitement to insurrection.Taking his 14th amendment argument to its logical conclusion, his attorney, D John Sauer, argued before the three-judge panel that Trump could order the military to assassinate an opponent and be protected from indictment unless he was first impeached and convicted by the Senate. His statement attempted to elevate to a constitutional immunity Trump’s notorious remark in 2015: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump’s attorney seemed unaware or indifferent that by the same logic President Biden could with impunity order the assassination of Trump.In 1927, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, 21 years old, was arrested, according to police records, at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, New York, where 1,000 robed and hooded Klansmen marched through the streets. “This never happened,” Donald Trump said when the story reappeared in 2022. “Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted, never even charged. It’s a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”The Trump trials have put the civil war and Reconstruction amendments on trial again – “the results of the war”, as Grant called it. Trump’s indictment under section 241 of the KKK Act tests the federal government’s ability and willingness to secure basic voting rights and defend the constitution. Or else there will be “bedlam”.
      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More