29 January 2016 - Donald Trump's absence overshadows last debate before Iowa caucus

Trump's solo act takes cues from vaudeville and tap dances around issues
Ben Jacobs (The Guardian, 28/01/2016)

In an old theater with red velvet curtains and folding wooden seats, Donald Trump trotted out his own unique variety show for a crowd of roughly 700 in the theater and millions more watching on cable news.
It was an attempt to resurrect the long-dead genre of vaudeville only replacing acrobats with Rick Santorum and tenors with veterans.
In lieu of participating in the Fox News presidential debate, Trump held his own special salute to veterans in the Sheslow Auditorium at Des Moines’s Drake University. He served as ringmaster, prancing on and off stage as fellow presidential candidates, combat veterans and YouTube celebrities all took turns paying tribute both to Trump and those who have served in the US armed forces.

Read on...

Donald Trump throws a grand old party
Maeve Reston (CNN, 29/01/2016)
No one ever really doubted that Donald Trump could pull off a major counter-programing feat -- even when competing with a GOP debate that was expected to draw millions of viewers.
He did it Thursday night, dazzling a crowd of hundreds of enthusiastic supporters by announcing that he had raised more than $6 million for veterans in one day -- $1 million of it from his own checkbook. "We love our vets," he said.
"You know, my whole theme is make America great again and that's what we're going to do --- and we wouldn't have even been here if it weren't for our vets," Trump said.
Read on...

Donald Trump’s Hostile Takeover of the G.O.P.
Ryan Lizza (The New Yorker, 28/01/2016)
Primaries are tricky to cover. By their nature, they exaggerate divisions within a party, bringing to the surface the most extreme elements in a political coalition. What, in the frantic year leading up to the nomination of a Presidential candidate, look like mass movements that are on the cusp of taking over a party often turn out to be nothing more than gyrations in the polls, even if they are extended ones, or the inflation of one noisy slice of the electorate that gets disproportionate media attention.
The history of Presidential primaries is the history of small and exciting movements that quickly get snuffed out. In 1996, when the Republican Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, his platform of protectionism, isolationism, and anti-Washington populism seemed to be near ascendant, but Bob Dole, the ultimate Washington insider, easily defeated him for the nomination. Four years later, when John McCain defeated George W. Bush in New Hampshire, many pundits argued that McCain’s reform conservatism, which coupled a hyper-interventionist foreign policy with left-leaning economic views, would redefine the G.O.P. But Bush easily regrouped and defeated McCain, partly by emphasizing his insufficient commitment to cutting taxes. McCain’s Wilsonian views on foreign policy did eventually prevail in the Bush years, but in 2008 he ran and won the nomination as a fairly conventional Republican. For a moment in the 2012 campaign cycle it seemed like Michele Bachmann was going to remake the G.O.P into a vehicle for the religious right, but she never made it past Iowa, and Mitt Romney, a Mormon who was viewed warily by many evangelicals, won instead.
Read on...