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      Trump wins big in Iowa as Haley and DeSantis fall short – podcast

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      It took just 30 minutes for the Associated Press to project Donald Trump the big winner in Iowa. Trump’s victory was expected, but as the night went on, all eyes were on the real contest – the race for second place. Ron DeSantis came out on top in Iowa, but is projected to fall far behind Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary.
      So what happens now? As the majority of Iowans put their faith in Trump, should we just assume he will be the Republican nominee? Can Haley and DeSantis take any positives away from such a poor showing behind the former president? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Joan E Greve, who spoke to him from a Haley caucus event, about all the potential avenues for the remaining candidates

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      Trump won Iowa handily. The idea that he won’t be the nominee is absurd | Moira Donegan

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      The journalists came in and issued their ritual dispatches from the bucolic midwest, describing the state in terms heavy on sentiment and light on respect. The candidates poured their money and time into the state, with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and one-time favorite for the nomination, betting all his hopes on the state. They persisted through an ominous blizzard and through the punishing cold of a plains winter to make it to the high school gyms and recreation centers where the caucuses took place. And they did all this, made all this effort and expense, in order to change absolutely nothing about the race.Trump won the Iowa caucuses handily; the major networks called for him almost as soon as the doors opened. There was never any question that he wouldn’t, except perhaps in the mind of the most delusional DeSantis aides. Nikki Haley was in a tight race for second against DeSantis, as each pretends that they are in fact really running for president – and not, as anyone can see, for the positions of vice-president and attorney general, respectively. Perhaps because Trump’s fait accompli has no plot and can’t drive ratings, or perhaps because they are in denial, the networks have spent the better part of the past year pretending that there is a legitimate primary contest in the Republican party. There isn’t.In retrospect, the notion that the 2024 Republican nominee would ever have been anyone other than Donald Trump was always a bit absurd. In 2022 and 2023, when large donors, exhausted by Trump, began pouring obscene amounts of money into the DeSantis campaign, the move had a kind of desperate logic. DeSantis had won re-election in Florida by a commanding 19 points; he had used the state to launch himself as an avatar of the racial and gender grievance that had animated many voters’ loyalty to Donald Trump. But DeSantis was supposed to be “Trump without the baggage”. He was a hyper-competent policy wonk who was supposed to be more effective, more focused and less susceptible to flattery, scandal or the distractions of short-term self-interest.But what DeSantis offered voters was Trump’s bevy of resentments without any of Trump’s humor or charisma. On the trail, DeSantis is reptilian and creepy. He has a plaintive, whining affect that makes his hatreds for racial and gender minorities become obviously pathetic, rather than commanding. He has an almost uncanny ability to say the wrong thing. In Iowa, he burned tens of millions of dollars in donor cash, like a dumped prom queen going through tissues. He needed a big win in Iowa, or what would have counted for a big win: a strong, definitive and close second place. He didn’t get it. It was a failure he paid dearly for. Over the past few weeks, DeSantis has been frantically travelling and pressing the flesh: he committed to doing in-person events in each and every one of Iowa’s 99 counties, and evidently has managed to be charmless and off-putting in every corner of the state.Haley, meanwhile, has consolidated much of the “Never Trump” vote, or what’s left of it, all while studiously refusing to criticize Trump much at all. The former president’s advisers have reportedly suggested he seek a woman for VP, to try to counter the political liability of Dobbs. Haley’s campaign for president, such as it is, has been little more than a long audition for this role, one embarked upon with an eager solicitousness that seems almost canine.Trump has long been understood as a morbid symptom of America’s failed institutions. He is what happens when a country takes on the pretext of being a pluralistic democracy without meaningfully politically empowering its historically subordinated populations; he is what happens when republican forms of government coexist with dramatic inequality of wealth; he is what happens when people understand corruption to guide their politicians more than principle, and when the clearly expressed desires of the electorate no longer seem to have any meaningful impact on the policy positions of decision-makers. All of these factors are behind his rise, and all of these factors drove him to victory in Iowa on Monday night with the same determination that they drove him to the nomination in 2016.But what it less clearly understood is why the media and political apparatus that surrounds Trump has been so slow to accommodate the reality he has imposed. The donors flocked to DeSantis in a very expensive kind of denial; the networks covered the challenges as if they were serious; newspapers told us, yet again, that Trump’s appeal must be understood by liberals, as if we have not been made so exhaustively, repetitively aware of Trump and the exact nature of his appeal for the better part of a decade now. As they proclaimed his victory, the news anchors muttered “it’s Donald Trump’s party now”. Just like they’ve done every night since 2016.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Tuesday briefing: What Trump’s triumph tells us about the state of the presidential race

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      Good morning. Last night, the race for the US presidency formally started – and Donald Trump has won the first round by a landslide. With 99% of votes counted, Trump has 51% of Republican support in the Iowa caucus – a victory of unprecedented dominance for any race not involving a sitting president.Ron DeSantis got 21% of votes, a very distant second place that he tried to present as a success – while Nikki Haley finished a disappointing third with 19% but claimed she now had the momentum to challenge Trump. In truth, though, the result is so decisive that it’s all but impossible to see anyone but Trump taking the nomination from here.Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s David Smith at the Trump victory party in Des Moines, explains what the results in Iowa mean for each of the three leading Republican campaigns. Here are the headlines.Five big stories
      Conservatives | Rishi Sunak is facing a Conservative meltdown over the Rwanda deportation bill after two deputy chairs said they would support rebel amendments aimed at blocking international human rights laws. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith have defied the prime minister by backing rightwing challenges to the bill, which will be debated by parliament on Tuesday.
      Middle East crisis | The Houthi militia group has continued to attack commercial shipping, hitting an American-owned container ship with a ballistic missile in defiance of US and UK strikes on Yemen. While the strike caused no major damage, it will add to fears that the militia group retains the ability to threaten commercial shipping.
      Rail strikes | Train drivers have called a further week of rolling strikes across England from late January in their long-running dispute with operators over pay. Members of the Aslef union will strike for 24 hours at each train-operating company on the national railway on different days between Tuesday 30 January and Monday 5 February.
      Security | Hizb ut-Tahrir will be banned from organising in the UK following claims that the group is antisemitic, the home secretary has said. The Islamist group is already banned in several countries including Germany and Indonesia.
      Emmys | Beef, The Bear and the final season of Succession reigned supreme at the delayed 2023 Emmy awards. Jesse Armstrong’s hit HBO drama picked up six awards, including for actors Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen and the night’s biggest award for best drama series. See the red carpet fashion and a full list of winners.
      In depth: In freezing weather, Trump wins by an avalancheWith Joe Biden secure as the Democratic nominee, this year’s primary calendar is only about one thing: who will be his Republican challenger. The answer to that question already looks pretty obvious, and the Iowa caucus did nothing to dispel it. But after months of the phoney campaign, the first real results do have important things to tell us about the state of the race – and whether those in the Republican party who don’t want Trump can unite behind an alternative.One minor piece of housekeeping before the main event: Trump tribute act Vivek Ramaswamy finished fourth with 8% of the vote and dropped out. “Nobody knew who we were, nobody knew what we were up to,” he said. A fitting political obituary.A ‘perfect night’ for Donald TrumpIn the run-up to Iowa, Trump’s campaign argued that any victory by 13 points or more would be a historic success: the biggest previous victory was Bob Dole’s 12.8-point margin in 1988. That was a very low bar to set given polls placed him 30 points ahead of the pack, and he cleared it by a distance last night.“I don’t think there was much question beforehand, but it looks even more certain now,” said David Smith. “He won 98 out of 99 counties, and he only lost to Haley by one vote in the other. He won the middle class suburbs where he might traditionally struggle against someone more moderate. It was a perfect night for Trump – it’s all over bar the shouting.”David was at Trump’s election watch party in a cavernous conference centre. “He won so quickly that hardly anyone was there when it was announced,” he said. “So you didn’t get the customary big cheer.” When his supporters did get in, they celebrated with popcorn and beer alongside Maga hardliners like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene – as well as Nigel Farage.Iowa’s Republican voters are among the most socially conservative in the US, but Trump’s margin is so vast that there’s no obvious route for either of his main opponents to make up the difference elsewhere. “You can make the case that this is a home fixture for him in some ways, and it will be a bit tougher next week in New Hampshire – but it swings back towards him very quickly after that,” David said.His win came despite his refusal to participate in debates with Republican rivals and a less intense campaign in Iowa than Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley ran. Although he has a more professional ground operation than he did in 2016, Trump has spent much less time in the state this time around. (He made just 18 visits in 2023, against dozens for his main rivals.) “He broke the rules of retail politics in Iowa,” David said. “But strategically it was very successful. Staying away from the debates helped enforce the impression of inevitability.” Starting this week, the Trump on Trial newsletter will bring daily analysis and weekly previews of the developments in the legal cases against the Republican presidential candidate. Sign up here.DeSantis beats the polls – but still gets trouncedOn Sunday, DeSantis (above) asked his supporters: “Are you ready to make some history on Monday night?” Finishing a distant second to Trump is hardly an epochal event – but it just about does enough to keep his campaign alive, and DeSantis will now claim to have momentum heading into the New Hampshire primary next week. He told supporters: “They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us … [but] we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.”In recent polls, the Florida governor has been behind Nikki Haley by several percentage points. But the always-unpredictable Iowa caucus process, in which voters listen to pitches from the candidates’ representatives before casting their ballots, was further complicated by freezing temperatures that depressed turnout – expected to finish at about 110,000 voters, against 187,000 in 2016 and the lowest in almost a quarter of a century.That appears to have benefited DeSantis, who has a well-funded get-out-the-vote operation in Iowa. “He lives to fight another day,” said David. “He worked very hard in the state, and he may have been helped by the extraordinarily cold weather. Polls for the Iowa caucus are often wrong – a lot of people I spoke to tonight before the first results came in expected him to finish second.”Even so, the DeSantis campaign remains in dire straits. “In the end it is pretty soul-crushing for him,” David said. “He went to all 99 counties, and lost within half an hour.” In 2022, he appeared to hold a promising position as “Trump without the baggage” – a candidate who could carry the former president’s ultra-conservative agenda on immigration, gun rights and culture war issues without the same accompanying chaos in the White House.But refusing to criticise Trump for months in the hope that his adversary would ultimately implode on his own has made him appear weak to voters who value strength above all – and basically pointless: “The people who want Trump don’t need a mini-me Trump,” former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock pointed out in August. Finishing ahead of Haley does little to dispel that fundamental dynamic.Haley falls short and leaves the field dividedThe former governor of South Carolina (above) has sought to present herself as the most electable Republican candidate in a general election, pointing to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that showed her 17 points ahead of Biden when voters are asked to choose between the two. In November, an endorsement and $4m from Americans for Prosperity, an immensely powerful libertarian political campaign group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, gave crucial credibility to her attempt to cement herself as the alternative to Trump.But last night’s results are a devastating blow to that argument. She told supporters: “I can safely say tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.” As David noted: “That’s a pretty unusual claim for the person who finished third.”Haley is likely to continue to New Hampshire, where she is second to Trump in recent polls by the relatively narrow margin of 11 points. The good news for Trump is that the narrow difference between her and DeSantis, together with her slightly better position in New Hampshire, means that neither is likely to drop out. “That’s the icing on the cake for Trump,” David said. “It blunts her momentum ahead of New Hampshire.”Although she entered politics as part of the proto-Maga Tea Party movement, Haley rejects Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and rivals have sought to portray her as too liberal to win the Republican nomination. While she largely echoes Trump on immigration, she has rejected policies like the separation of families at the border. She has focused on her foreign policy experience as Trump’s ambassador to the UN, and promised to find a compromise on abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the end, though, a candidate whose main appeal was electability appears likely to be fatally harmed by doing so badly in an actual vote. “If she had pulled off second, the landscape would look pretty different,” David said. “There would be a conversation about her as the challenger, and whether DeSantis is going to pull out. But instead, this looks like an illustration of fractured opposition. Neither Haley or DeSantis has ever really escaped the shadow of Trump to build their own political identities.”What else we’ve been reading
      David Smith spoke with Raymond Arsenault, the author of the first full-length biography of the late congressman and civil rights giant John Lewis (above, left). They discuss Lewis’s life, his guiding values of compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness that informed his politics and his storied career in Congress. Nimo
      After the Daily Telegraph published an opinion poll yesterday that suggested the Conservatives are heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat, Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome, has a perceptive piece on who’s behind it – and why it’s come out now. Archie
      By 2030, the global population will be older than it ever has been: one in six people will be over the age of 60. This touching and thoughtful photo essay by Ed Kashi, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, and Sara Terry documents the daily lives of 72-year-olds from around the world. Nimo
      Julian Baggini reflects on the rare consensus that has emerged around the Post Office scandal – and warns that very few injustices are likely to be so easily understood. “There has been something cathartic about this collective show of anger,” he writes. “But it is not always as easy as this to side with the angels.” Archie
      Dominic Sessa’s original plan in high school was to become a professional hockey player but a broken femur forced him to change course. His new plan was to act. Sessa spoke to Adrian Horton about the chance audition that led him to the opportunity of a lifetime. Nimo
      SportTennis | Andy Murray (above) admitted that there is a “definite possibility” that he has played his last Australian Open after the five-time finalist suffered his most sobering grand-slam defeat since returning from hip surgery. Murray lost 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 to Tomás Martín Etcheverry, the 30th seed, in the first round of the Australian Open. Follow live coverage of day three here.Football | Aitana Bonmatí said she was “proud” to be part of a generation of women “changing the game and the world” as the Spain World Cup star claimed the title of the Best Fifa women’s player for 2023 at a star-studded award ceremony in London. Lionel Messi won the men’s award for a third time, narrowly pipping Erling Haaland to the prize.Football | Nottingham Forest are facing a potential points deduction after being charged with breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR), and Everton could lose more points after being charged with a further breach of the same rules. Will Unwin’s analysis explains the spending spree that put Forest in the dock.The front pages“Defiant Houthis attack cargo ship as conflict widens in Middle East” is the headline on our Guardian print lead this morning. “Name calling” – the Daily Mirror leads with the royals and the Queen’s apparent posthumous vent about Lilibet-gate. The i has “Migrants taken off first Rwanda flight still in asylum hotels 18 months later” while the Daily Telegraph reports “Tory deputy chairmen to rebel over Rwanda Bill”. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail seek to rally Rishi Sunak – respectively, their headlines are “PM: I’ll defy Euro judges who block Rwanda flights” and “PM: I will defy Euro judges on Rwanda flights”. The Times reports “Sunak will speed Rwanda appeals in sop to rebels”. The Metro says “Child sex scandal report … 96 Rochdale groomers still free”. Top story in the Financial Times is “Better governance and IT would save £20bn a year, says spending watchdog”.Today in FocusWill South Africa’s genocide case against Israel succeed?South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza at hearings in the international court of justice. Chris McGreal reports on what happens nextCartoon of the day | Ben JenningsThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badDuring the pandemic, Henry Jephson, head of research at the Bristol Fungarium, came across a lion’s mane, a rare type of mushroom which is under threat in the UK. Jephson’s sighting of the enormous shaggy specimen was the first in eight years in south-west England, so he was shocked to see that the landowner had felled its host tree, smashing the mushroom in the process. The experience accelerated a shift in the focus of his work to conservation of native fungi alongside Natural England and the Royal Horticultural Society. Jephson now helps run a mushroom farm, which has pivoted from growing commercial mushrooms to conserving natural, wild mushrooms and creating health supplements from them.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
      Quick crossword
      Cryptic crossword
      Wordiply More

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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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      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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      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. 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