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Scott Bixby (now), Tom McCarthy (earlier)

National Review goes all-out 'against Trump' – as it happened

Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up in Las Vegas earlier this week.
Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up in Las Vegas earlier this week. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Jeb Lund has a coda to his day-long series on National Review’s multi-pronged attack on billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump:

There are so many other blog posts in The National Review’s “Against Trump” extravaganza, and they are all, like perfect snowflakes made from Flint river water whipped up by a freezing wind, toxic to your brain.

They deserve to be decontaminated and scorned, but unfortunately, we lack the time and space. It is Friday, and we all deserve peace. Besides, this is a family newspaper, and so many of the words Herr Buckley’s flunkies’ desperate gallimaufry richly deserve are unprintable here.

But this is exhausting, a plundering of the human spirit, a slow paddle against a ceaseless undertow.

Instead, in this time of trial, I turn to the words of a man who had some crazy ideas. You might have heard of him. A man who said some things nobody wanted to hear, who wasn’t always understood by everybody and who a lot of people, by acclaim, wanted hauled off and strung up by the authorities:

We close today with a man so serially buffoonish, incorrect and savagely stupid that, if you were on fire and he handed you a bucket of water, you might pause to make sure it wasn’t gasoline.

Bill Kristol, inheritor of his father’s movement, an outlet kept afloat by the largesse of plutocrats because its contents are dedicated to venerating and excusing them while excoriating their critics, asks, “Hasn’t Donald Trump been a votary merely of wealth rather than of freedom?”

He quotes Leo Strauss, champion of the noble lie, before asking, “Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?” In anyone else’s mouth, this would be a valid question, perhaps even a damning one. But if the human body contains 10 pints of blood, William Kristol could slip-n-slide from Mosul to Baghdad on a torrent of either the 1,000,000 or the 10,000,000 pints of it his ennobling ambitions loosed from countless families onto Iraq’s sands.

Bill’s commitment to framing his thinking like a TV movie of first-year law school appears yet again in his concluding paragraph, in which the man who brought you Sarah Palin asks: “Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained?”

Mission accomplished. Bring ‘em on. We’re gonna smoke ‘em outta their caves.

You hack, you prevaricator, you bloodstained wretch, you engineer of misery. How dare you. The only right you have to criticize another human still drawing breath for engaging in two-bit Caesarism atop an empire of fraud is the same one Krusty the Clown has for apoplexy at another entertainer doing a crank phone call routine: “If this is anyone other than Steve Allen, you’re stealing my bit.”

Updated

It’s time to spend some a few minutes again with one of my very old friends, Thomas Sowell. Or, as I like to call him, “Hitler-Reference Urkel.”

In a country with more than 300 million people, it is remarkable how obsessed the media have become with just one - Donald Trump.

Hahaha, it is funny. This is one of Sowell’s many tics, where he takes something eminently explicable about which he feels peevish and magnifies it into a mystifying new social aberration that can only prove the world has gone mad. It’s an affectedly homespun voice that is meant to contrast the author’s clear-eyed humility with the fantastical manias of the modern world. This is how an academic with enough initials after his name to stencil all the crypts in a Balkan cemetery comes to feign surprise at the fact that a media figure for the last three decades who once helmed a hit reality show and has his own chain of branded hotels is the subject of media “obsession” just because he is one of two people leading the polls for the most powerful job in the world.

No national leader ever aroused more fervent emotions than Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. Watch some old newsreels of German crowds delirious with joy at the sight of him. The only things at all comparable in more recent times were the ecstatic crowds that greeted Barack Obama when he burst upon the political scene in 2008.

Therrrrrre we are. There’s that Hitler-reference endorphin hit. Daddy had to read two whole paragraphs before getting his medicine.

Elections, however, have far more lasting and far more serious—or even grim—consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Mark Helprin just established that Donald Trump is Barack Obama, who is Eva Person, who is also Mussolini and a tapeworm and Allah and Britney Spears. Are these guys even on the same page?

After the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, we are entering an era when people alive at this moment may live to see a day when American cities are left in radioactive ruins.

This is what’s great about Thomas Sowell. Most writers would be satisfied with just the Hitler reference. They’d drop Adolf in there, maybe go “BOOOOSH!” with a co-worker and, you know, bump fists and blow it up, but this man is committed. There is no contemptibly implausible nightmare scenario that Thomas Sowell can’t shoehorn into any topic next to another contemptibly implausible nightmare scenario. After all, a world where Barack Obama is basically Hitler is just as plausible a world in which a nation with no nuclear weapons could become an existential threat to a nation of about 320m people virtually overnight.

A shoot-from-the-hip, bombastic showoff is the last thing we need or can afford.

Thomas Sowell is a recurring guest on The O’Reilly Factor. Also, Donald Trump is probably Hitler, which means that America will have back-to-back Hitlers for the first time since Hitler and Clone Hitler. Q.E.D. Thomas Sowell just flexed and removed his sweater vest to reveal another sweater vest underneath. It’s sweater vests all the way down.

Updated

Weather update: the snow is already falling in Washington, DC.

The Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui is at a second Clinton event of the day in New Hampshire (see Sabrina’s report on Clinton’s earlier appearance at a town hall in Rochester):

It takes Mark Helprin all of 40 words to get to his first simile, which likens Barack Obama to Mussolini, and Donald Trump to Barack Obama, in that his Mussolininess is more Mussoliniful than even Obama’s. Then, in the next sentence, Trump is a caudillo, “surpassing even our own Evita,” who could be Barack Obama as well, although that might distract from his Mussoliniing.

From there, we’re onto the neologism “politichiens.” I can only imagine the author pushing emphatically back from a massive rolltop desk, taking the antique meerschaum pipe in hand, and blowing bubbles out of it, each borne aloft on hot, damply satisfied breath, before bursting near the ceiling, a satisfying pop of another mot juste released. Aha indeed! “You see, it sounds like politician, but in French it means dogs,” he says, to the empty room. A father or a grandfather stares sternly from a picture frame, trapped in this pose for eternity and wondering if, at one point, he stood too long with his crotch near a microwave or X-ray machine.

After that, we have Trump’s “raging megalomania, matched only by Obama’s.” Ahaha. OK. Perhaps the reason why nobody not paid to contribute to conservative media has been able to detect the raging megalomania is because “the president sometimes tries to conceal [it] beneath a laughably transparent gossamer of false modesty.” Laughable! Laughable, I tell you.The room is still empty.

Trump, “like a tapeworm,” has “invaded the schismatically weakened body of the Republican party.” But, in his Mussolini-Evita-Tapewormness, he is “like Allah in Islamic theology.” We should be cautioned against worshipping this false divinity, for the man handling the nuclear codes is not “a stolid military officer but Britney Spears or Ozzy Osbourne.”

Indeed, was it not Evita Mussolini who once said, “Oops, we’re going off the rails on a crazy train again”? Historians tell us he was a tapeworm when he said this.
That is why Donald Trump is bad.

Trump contains multitudes. Apparently including Chingy, the platinum-selling naughties rapper from St. Louis.

Chingy’s on Twitter:

New Iowa poll shows – polling haywire

The Des Moines register contemplates a wee difference in two recent Iowa polls of the Democratic nomination race:

Is Sanders up by 8? Or is Clinton up by 29?

@jaselzer would be Ann Selzer, the mind behind the Register’s state polling who alone identified Barack Obama on the path to victory in the state in 2008 and Rick Santorum coming on strong in 2012.

The latest Selzer Iowa poll, from 14 January, had Clinton up by 2 in Iowa, 42-40 over Sanders – but Clinton had slid from 46 points in the prior poll.

Stay tuned.

Updated

Returning to the state where her rival Bernie Sanders holds a formidable lead, Hillary Clinton continued to push the electability argument at the start of a one-day swing through New Hampshire on Friday.
Addressing a crowd of roughly 500 at an opera house in Rochester, Clinton framed the election as one in which the stakes “are really high.”
“They’re high because we have to make a fundamental decision: Are we going to try and build on the progress we have made under President Obama or are we going to tear it apart and start from scratch?” she said.

Introducing Clinton at the event was the popular home state senator Jeanne Shaheen, who has worked closely with Sanders in the Senate but similarly cast the choice before Democrats as one of pragmatism versus idealism.
“I don’t just want rhetoric in this campaign. I want actions,” Shaheen said. “I want to support a candidate who’s going to get something done.”
Clinton and her allies have drawn an increasing contrast with Sanders not simply on who is better positioned to be the standard bearer of the Democratic Party – but who stands a superior chance of setting foot in the White House. A day earlier in Iowa, Clinton launched one of her most direct critiques of the Vermont senator to date as someone who, despite having the right principles, was not rooted in reality.
“I am not interested in ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world,” Clinton said during a stop in Indianola. “I care about making a real difference in your life and that gets to the choice you have to make in this caucus.”

I’ll show you pragmatism.
I’ll show you pragmatism. Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP

Although she did not mention Sanders by name in New Hampshire, the state that neighbors his home, Clinton again bore the image of a doer and not just a talker.
“I know how hard it is to get through a recalcitrant obstructionist Congress,” she said.
It was Clinton’s first stop of the day, before an enthusiastic crowd that frequently cheered – and even whistled – throughout her remarks and subsequent Q&A. The former secretary of state was scheduled to appear at a dinner to mark the 43rd anniversary of Roe v Wade and a second town hall later in the evening.

Ahhh, a palate cleanser. Over at the Washington Post, Callum Borchers interviews National Review editor Rich Lowry, who is God’s answer to the question, “What would the sentence ‘Dad, I lost my retainer’ look like if it was a person?”

This is the first exchange:

FIX: How long ago did you start this project? It must have been quite the undertaking.

LOWRY:It was a month in the making.

The last monument to futility that took this long to erect was the bridge on the river Kwai, and at least that worked before someone dynamited it. Seriously, a month? Every single one of these essays could have been farted out on an iPhone in between savaging benedicts at a mimosa-fueled brunch, and it would be more insulting if they weren’t.

These essays aren’t just short, they’re short on everything. Ideas, information, humor, something that makes the written word feel like it’s capable of creating inspiration or joy. For a bunch of conservatives, the faint stench of actual work hovers nowhere near any of these entries. There are at best a few decent installments in here. Apart from not noticing that every GOP candidate since 1968 has sounded like George Wallace, Ben “No, I really wrote this piece myself this time” Domenech is not bad. David Boaz’s entry is tolerable. Everything else is a hilarious failure.

Besides wealthy men who probably share the same pro-business, authoritarian anti-regulatory mindset and culture-war indifference of Donald Trump, who reads the National Review? Who is going to be persuaded by this aside from think tank homunculi who want to continue cashing checks from the conservative noise machine? Who, among the populist, anti-establishment Trump fans will reconsider their support after seeing this sclerotic, enfeebled attempt to push over an ivory back scratcher in protest? Who would read this out of anything but spite? A terminal tubercular patient at a hospice could open a window and talk out of it like Eddie Redmayne and reach more people.

Ben Carson’s steady decline has been a feature of the Republican primary race since the fall.

After briefly overtaking Donald Trump in late October, the former neurosurgeon has now sunk into a third tier of candidates. Carson has been hurt both by negative attacks by Trump, painting the sedate surgeon as “low energy”, as well as major questions about his foreign policy expertise, or lack thereof, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.

Carson: fading.
Carson: fading. Photograph: Rainier Ehrhardt/AP

On Thursday, Carson returned to the campaign trail for the first time in days after a volunteer died in a car accident on Tuesday. Braden Joplin was a 25-year-old from Texas who had come to Iowa to volunteer for the Carson campaign. Two other volunteers and one campaign staffer were also injured in the accident.

Joplin’s last post on Facebook simply said “Trust In God” and Carson’s town halls on Thursday and for the duration of the week were renamed Trust In God town halls. Carson began his remarks at the first of two stops in the town of Glenwood by comparing Joplin to Nathan Hale, a hero of the American revolution who was hanged by the British after being caught spying. Carson thought Hale, whose famous last words were “I only regret that I have one life to give to my country”, was a precursor to Joplin.

Read the full piece here:

Christie to return to New Jersey for storm

“But I will be back”:

See earlier:

New Jersey goes full Jersey on Christie for staying away from storm

This may get him on camera more than another New Hampshire town hall would. Not in New Hampshire, mind you:

Updated

These have been going on a bit long, so let’s indulge in an exercise to see how quickly we can dispense with a blog post. In the spirit of the late, great sports blog Fire Joe Morgan, let’s bold quotes from the original author and see if we can use the fewest words in reply below.

If you guessed that Mona Charen’s thesis was “one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative,” you win a complimentary bottle of Ronald Reagan-inspired Just For Men intimate hair dye. Let’s see what else she has to say.

Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government.

Sure, okay.

Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others...?

I’d have to write 1,000 words here just to have a structure on which to link every single atrocity from the last three months, but has Mona Charen ever looked at a single candidate’s Twitter page?

Rand Paul’s teems with cowardly snide barbs, like the kid at the back of the classroom who desperately wants to needle someone at the front into a fight but still disguises his voice so the jocks can’t be sure it’s him. If Mike Huckabee’s Twitter feed was a schoolyard game, it’d be Smear the Queer. The only reason Jeb Bush’s Twitter isn’t a litany of cyber-bullying is that he’s even now only halfway through figuring out how to end his “The Jerk Store called...” burn.

The number-one rule of conservative mass politics and virality is always punch down. If that’s not possible, punch sideways. You don’t even have to get into some abstract discussion of the Southern Strategy to know that constantly pwning noobs, enemies, and the teeming Other in the Republican field gets you clickthrough. If you’re going to be mad at Trump for this, at least be honest: Admit you’re mad because he’s so much better at it.

Whoops, that was too many words. Let’s go back to pithy. Charen’s closing line:

When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.

Updated

Guardian Washington bureau chief Dan Roberts is dressed for Vermont – plus he’s wearing cozy boots, we hope:

Michigan’s embattled governor, Rick Snyder, declared on Friday morning that despite assertions to the contrary, the Flint water crisis is “absolutely not” a case of environmental racism.

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Republican governor acknowledged “major failures” on the part of the state’s government in addressing the lead contamination that has poisoned thousands of residents of Flint, Michigan, but strongly resisted charges that racism was one of those failures.

“I’ve made a focused effort since before I started in office to say we need to work hard to help people that have the greatest need,” Snyder said. “This was a terrible tragedy. These people work for me. And that’s why it was important to accept responsibility, and my focus is on fixing this problem.”

Read the full piece here:

Next up is L. Brent Bozell III, of the Media Research Center and formerly of the Parents Television Council, whose sole purpose was furnishing studio mailing addresses for every sexless tightass who wanted to write an angry letter whenever they saw lesbians kissing on TV.

A fun note about that: El Bozo and the PTC once published a damning report on the content of the World Wrestling Federation’s flagship show Monday Night Raw. It documented hundreds of acts of simulated sex and drug use. Only it turned out that the criteria for “simulated sex and drug use” was so expansive that they included “miming smoking a joint” and “doing crotch chops.”

The person who shredded the report to bits was a rollercoasters- and Tori Amos-loving heavyset adorable muppet of a professional wrestler named Mick Foley, who used to wrestle under names like “Dude Love” and carried a devastating finishing weapon called “Mr. Socko.” He now writes children’s books and volunteers as a spokesperson for RAINN.

So, by all means, let’s take seriously a guy who got clowned on by Dude Love.

Bozell opens his column with, “Longtime conservative leader Richard Viguerie has a simple test for credentialing a conservative: Does he walk with us?” It’s an interesting question, and Bozell answers it through the noblest lens: self-interest. (Viguerie is the architect of conservatism’s decades-long direct-mail scam unit, which has lined the pockets of deep-thinking gold salesmen like Glenn Beck.)

His overall point is about what you’d expect: Donald Trump isn’t actually a conservative. He donated money to Democrats! Now, leave aside that the most reliable conservatives in America are the people who’ve been funding the Republican Party for decades and who are rich enough and smart enough to grease Democrats too, just like The Donald. What’s interesting is who Bozell thinks gets hurt by this.

Buying a seat at the table is bad when someone like Trump only wants to build buildings, get his permits fast-tracked and cut through zoning problems. In the immortal words of Dandy Don Fanucci, Brent just wants to get his beak wet. Consider:

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance; spoke annually to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Young Americans for Freedom, and other organizations to rally the troops; supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him; raised money for countless conservative groups; wrote hundreds of op-eds; and delivered even more speeches, everywhere championing our cause.”

Let’s put this in human language: Donald Trump doesn’t prop up two publications that have always been reliant on wealthy donors to create the illusion of not being a complete failure in the marketplace. He doesn’t lend his name to the marquee of an annual merch-and-huckster conventions that charge true believers stupid sums to get the opportunity to buy a copy of Marco Rubio’s book before asking for his autograph. Trump didn’t support the candidate L. Brent Bozell III’s father ghostwrote a book for! And he didn’t raise money for foundations like L. Brent Bozell III’s or pay people like L. Brent Bozell III thousands of dollars to write op-eds and speeches under his name.

“We conservatives should support the one candidate who walks with us.” We need the candidate who knows he needs to grease the wheels of our machine. We need to get our beaks wet.

Who’s most likely to ascend to the seat of all Earthly power?

Bill Clinton on Thursday called for an end to the epidemic of deadly police violence against young African American men. Clinton, the 42nd President and wife of 2016 Democrat Presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, said America needed “inclusive social policies” to heal the deep wounds in society.

“I’m tired of looking at young African American men shot in the street when they’re unarmed,” Clinton told supporters at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I’m tired of that. We need to believe in the police again, and they need to believe in us again.”

Clinton did not explicitly call for tougher gun control legislation, but he said: “Everyone knows if you carry guns around someone is going to get shot.”

In Las Vegas Thursday.
In Las Vegas Thursday. Photograph: ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to research by the Guardian. Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged that year. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.

Clinton, who was speaking in a school gymnasium in downtown Las Vegas, questioned how far American society had come since the Los Angeles police brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991.

His comments on the dangers of guns came as the gun industry was meeting across town on Las Vegas’s strip to celebrate a record year for gun sales as people rushed out to buy firearms due to fears of increased gun control measures proposed by President Obama and other democrats.

Did you see that last Iowa poll?
Did you see that last Iowa poll? Photograph: David Becker/AP

Earlier in the day leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump held a rally at Shot Show, the world’s largest guns and firearms industry trade fair at the Venetian Casino. At the rally he called for increased spending on the US military.

Clinton also spoke about the new and unacceptable threats being faced by “your fellow Americans who are Muslim”. Trump has called for a “total and complete shutdown” of the country’s borders to Muslims in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December.

About 500 people turned out to the Clinton rally held at Advanced Technologies Academy to the north of downtown Las Vegas. Among them was Belinda Aldeguer, a 53-year-old nurse, who said: “I love Bill Clinton. He is my favourite ever president. Everything was better when he was in office.

“I think Hillary can win it [the election], people know she is a hard worker and has been in politics her entire life and she loves America. You can’t top her.”

Updated

If you ever need to convince people that an issue is serious and the time for sober reflection is now, you really can’t go wrong with Glenn Beck. Sometimes I worry about having a stroke and losing my ability to communicate ideas with anybody, but I know that, even if I lose all speech, I’ll still be able to explain the concept of “keeping jars of urine in your house and fearing microscopic germs” by holding up a picture of this anthropomorphized accretion of rancid margarine.

I really don’t know what genius at National Review thought Glenn Beck would be a good representative for impeaching an opportunistic huckster prone to wild populist confabulation. Sending Beck to stop Trump is like trying to get a gravy stain out of a carpet by steamrolling a prime rib into it. This guy so regularly leaks torrents of crocodile tears that if you’d sent him back to Bronze Age Egypt, the denizens along the Nile would have invented the calendar to chart how often Glenn Beck flooded their banks.

In Jerusalem’s Old City in 2011.
In Jerusalem’s Old City in 2011. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP

Anyway, a good game to play with any piece of conservative commentary is to see how many words you get into the piece before you see the first shameless rejection of objective reality. In “When Conservatives Needed Allies, Donald Trump Sided with Obama,” Beck takes 47 words. He couldn’t even get out of his first paragraph:

As the election of 2008 approached, America was in crisis. And as we would soon learn, that crisis would not go to waste. Years after Bill Clinton disingenuously claimed that the era of big government was over, Obama won his party’s nomination by promising its furious revenge.”

Boy, that furiously vengeful Obama guy. Remember that Shepard Fairey VENGEANCE poster? Remember how conservatives have attacked him for being too measured and dispassionate, just as lefties castigated him for believing too long in bipartisan comity that would never be forthcoming? No matter. Big government vengeance. Molto vengeance.

Beck’s thesis is another installment of the “Republicans Lose Elections Because All Our Candidates Are RINOs” theory. “Conservatives were forced to either stay home or hold their noses and vote for a progressive Republican.” Yep, progressive John McCain.

“Glenn is a failing, crying, lost soul!” – Donald Trump
“Glenn is a failing, crying, lost soul!” – Donald Trump Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Beck then explains that Donald Trump supported the TARP bailouts and the bailout of General Motors, so he’s probably McCain again? Or something. Regardless, despite the big money part of the Republican Party being 100% OK with those decisions, Republicans will not like this. “[Donald Trump] consistently advocated that your money be spent.” That charlatan. Here, buy these $150 Glenn Beck jeans or this $200 Glenn Beck axe.

This blog is probably already longer than Beck’s, which could have been dictated to Siri while using an axe to chop a bunch of jeans for the old Franklin stove, so we should depart here, but let us leave with this gem of a Beck quote:
“Rising out of the ashes of that electoral defeat came the Tea Party. The media struggled to explain it away as racist, xenophobic, and jingoistic.”

Not really, man. All you had to do was post photos of the signs they carried.

Meanwhile, outside:

Matt Labash’s Nine Tales of Trump at His Trumpiest in the Weekly Standard is a gem. Here’s one:

In an exhaustive survey of the late Spy’s archive, Bloomberg’s Andre Tartar found that Spy mentioned Trump an average of 8.7 times per issue in its first 50 issues. What they called him wasn’t pretty: a well-fed condo hustler, an ugly cuff-link buff, a close-friend-free millionaire, a Forbes 400 dropout. The most frequent and hurtful insult of all was “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Trump, for his part, took the bait at least once, declaring to the New York Post’s Page Six, “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body.” But the sobriquet stung the thin-skinned Trump badly enough that Graydon Carter, Spy’s cofounder and the current editor of Vanity Fair, writes that to this day, he occasionally receives an envelope from Trump, “generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them, he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.” (On Twitter, Trump has called Carter “sloppy,” “a disaster,” and a “major loser — just ask his wife!”)

My fingers are long and beautiful, as, has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body.
My fingers are long and beautiful, as, has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body. Photograph: Isaac Brekken/AP

Updated

Donald Trump has retweeted a tweet depicting Jeb Bush as a panhandler outside Trump Tower in Manhattan. The tweet was sent by user “WhiteGenocideTM,” whose Twitter bio lists the user’s location as “Jewmerica” and whose timeline is a stream of confusing but definitely racist invective. Update: and that profile pic is American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell.

Will this latest display of Trump’s callous indulgence in hateful behavior be the straw that broke the camel’s back? Will his fan base be repulsed at his incivility and easy rapport with prejudice and desert him? Has he finally gone too far? j/k

Updated

Jeb Lund is going to be submitting to the blog some reviews-in-brief of the National Review’s “Against Trump” essays. Jeb introduces today’s series:

National Review, a Thurston Howell impression on print and with staples in it, published a special edition yesterday titled “Against Trump.” Not stop Trump, or Dump Trump or even Chump Trump. “Against Trump.” Toward a Normative Understanding of Trump Negation. Whatever.

I’m sure it will be very effective with all 5,000 subscribers who are not conservative think tanks. There is definitely no way that the snob mouthpiece of the Republican Party rolling out a coordinated attack on Donald Trump will backfire. And nobody will make fun of the cover, and the august list of contributors definitely does not read like a grocery list beginning with “Lunatic,” stopping off twice at “Nepotist” and hitting all the other lowlights of fraudster, homophobe, etc.

What makes this especially fun is that, as explained elsewhere, everything that makes Donald Trump a runaway success is a creation of conservatism. He is their Be Careful What You Wish For candidate. (This guy put it about as succinctly and hilariously as anyone can.) National Review can stand athwart history and yell stop, but they’re standing in front of a snowball they’ve been pushing down a hill for the last half century. Even the hand-wringing that Donald Trump is such an ugly and hateful candidate is hilarious from a rag that started out defending liberty and segregation.

So let’s drop in and visit with some of these contributions, really dig in, see what conservatism has to say about this dreadful Trump gentlemen. Let’s open the pages of America’s version of the Habsburg family Christmas form letter and see how everyone’s mental health is doing.

Barbara Bush, mother of Jeb and George W and wife of George HW, endorses Jeb’s candidacy in a new video released by the Bush camp.

“Of all the people running, he seems to be the one who could solve the problems,” the Bush matriarch says. “I think he’ll be a great president.”

Barbara Bush has evolved on the question of her son Jeb’s candidacy. In April 2013 she told an interviewer that “We’ve had enough Bushes” in the White House and it was time for one of the other great American families to step up.

But last year, after Jeb Bush announced his candidacy, Barbara Bush walked that position back in a fundraising email:

When the idea of Jeb running for president first came up, I was hesitant,” the email said. “You may have heard about that. When you see the pounding candidates, their spouses and even their children take, what mother wouldn’t be?

“But our problems are so profound that America needs a leader who can renew the promise of this great nation.”

Sanders throws changeup at Clinton

To the delight of supporters and irritation of journalists, Bernie Sanders very rarely departs from his prepared pitch when talking to campaign rallies.

There’s a lot in the standard stump speech – healthcare, inequality, campaign finance, revolution, to list just the introduction – but he packs in the same messages, sometimes four or five times day, across towns all over America to audiences who mostly haven’t heard it before.

Every now and again, though, you can hear variations in the language that bring its underlying thinking into sharp new light. Today in the picturesque mountain town of Conway, North Hampshire, Sanders seems to be speaking directly to Hillary Clinton when he defends his plan to expand Medicare so it provides government medical insurance for everyone.

“If we were a poor people, honest politicians would say we can’t afford healthcare for all,” he says, in what seems a response to Clinton’s claim that such promises are disingenuous. “But we are the wealthiest country in the history of the world, the problem is almost all of that wealth rests in the hands of the few.”

Critics may quibble about the lack of detail over how he will get there, but the warm crowd of supporters here in New Hampshire seem to find the logic inescapable. Wealth redistribution, he argues, has already taken place: just in the wrong direction, so now it’s time to reverse the flow. Revolutionary? Maybe. Popular? Very.

New Jersey goes full Jersey on Christie for staying away from storm

New Jersey governor Chris Christie is taking flak for planning to continue to campaign in New Hampshire even as his home state sits in the crosshairs of a major weekend snowstorm.

Update 1pm ET: Christie announces return to New Jersey to deal with storm

But it’s not as if he’s not doing anything about the storm. He’s in briefings!

Perhaps less reassuring for New Jerseyans, Christie told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that the state’s power grid is “incredibly vulnerable, and incredibly fragile... a bad storm, a historic storm like Sandy, put the most densely populated state in the nation without power for 75 percent of the state for three weeks.”

Great! While Christie tweets from afar about briefings, the National Weather Center is sending tweets like this:

One of the top-read stories this morning on nj.com runs under the headline, “Christie continues to ‘actively monitor the winter storm’ from N.H.” Read the comments! Here’s a tame one:

Chrissy has no problem collecting a paycheck from NJ taxpayers. He should get his butt back in NJ! How can anyone still support this bum? Most people will remember his (in)actions!

With or without a winter storm, Christie lost his once strong popularity in New Jersey after it was revealed that his aides and associates conspired to close lanes on the George Washington bridge in an act of political retribution.

But Christie must be feeling a bit haunted by the weather. He was criticized in 2010 for continuing a Disney vacation during a blizzard, telling reporters at the time, “I was in charge from Florida.”

And Republicans aren’t letting him forget another big storm, at another big political moment:

Updated

What is the GOP 'establishment'?

Gauging the impact of the National Review assault on Trump takes some untangling of conservatism as a whole in today’s USA.

If the magazine represents the intellectual old guard (with a sprinkle of new) and Bob Dole-Terry Branstad-Trent Lott-Mitch McConnell represent the last generation of GOP powerholders, and middle-income Jeb Bush supporters represent the centrists and Ted Cruz represents an elected insurgency and Sarah Palin Tea Party-ers-slash-Donald Trump fans represent a populist revolt and... whew.

The old school.
The old school. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS

“So what does ‘Establishment’ mean?” Drew Ryun asks in a post on The Resurgent. “How do we define it?” Ryun’s answer typifies the insurgent GOP mindset and explains why even longtime elected Washington officials run from the E-word:

The simple answer is: the opposite of conservatism. And if conservatism is the approach that individuals know best, not the government, and therefore seek to constrain the size, scope and intrusion of government into our lives, then being part of the Establishment means that those who are part of it believe government knows best, not individuals, and do nothing to constrain the size, scope and intrusion of it into our lives and, in fact, seek to grow it that they may benefit from its growth. The latter is collusion between Big Business and Big Government.

Read the full piece here. Last night in Las Vegas, Trump claimed that the “establishment” was coming around on his candidacy:

“I think they’re warming up. I want to be honest, I have received so many phone calls from people that you would call establishment, from people - generally speaking … conservatives, Republicans - that want to come onto our team,” Trump said.

The new school.
The new school. Photograph: Mikayla Whitmore/AP

'We love you!' Conservative women turn blind eye to Donald Trump's slurs

Donald Trump does not like to be interrupted. He banishes protesters from his rallies; a woman in a hijab garnered international prominence when she was removed from a campaign event earlier this month.

But there are exceptions to his rule. One morning this week, as a pack of Iowans gazed at the mogul-for-president without much wondering whether Sarah Palin would pop up next to him, Trump’s remarks on polling and winning and being “greedy for America” got cut off by the crowd – twice.

A woman near the stage was wearing his now trademark hat – bearing that slogan, “Make America Great Again” – which caught the attention of the candidate. Trump said he loved it, and she shouted: “I love you!”

Then there was the woman toward the back of the curtain-draped room in the corn-country suburb. This first-in-the-nation caucus state must be getting sick of him, Trump joked from behind his dais. “No!” the woman screamed out. “We love you!”

Read the full piece here.

Clinton rankles crowd with <5 minute speech

Hillary Clinton left her audience cold in Iowa City on Thursday night, after she spoke for less than five minutes to a crowd of more than a thousand people, some of whom had lined up for more than an hour to see her.[...]

The lack of length and substance of her address appeared to upset some in the crowd.

“It was like a political commercial,” said Allison Steigerwald, a 24-year-old graduate student at the university. “I thought she was saying goodbye to Demi [Lovato, the attending entertainer] and then she’d start her speech. But it never happened.”

Short ’n‘ sweet!
Short ’n‘ sweet! Photograph: Jae C. Hong/AP

“It was very short,” said Jennifer Marks, 22. “There were a lot of statements. Like: ‘We are we going to make things happen.’” Marks said. “No actual how.”

“I just feel bad for the people who got here at five,” she said.

Read the full piece here:

Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. Here’s what’s happening:

Food fight!

Donald Trump is the target this morning of a double-fisted attack by the National Review, the old-guard conservative magazine. The Review editors have marshaled some two-dozen top voices on the right for a special issue devoted to trashing Trump. In fact the issue is called “Against Trump”.

In an introduction to the issue, the editors warn that Trump “is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries,” continuing:

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

There is a lot, lot more where that came from here.

Jeb! hits a note of impatience in that tweet, doesn’t he?

So – does this mean the Republican establishment cavalry has finally arrived, to surround Trump the intruder and put him down, in favor of a more familiar, more manageable choice, such as Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush?

In short, no. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Jonathan Martin points out that while “conservative intellectuals” of the kind writing for the Review (eesh – did we just call Glenn Beck an intellectual?) may prefer Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, to Trump, a separate wing of the party – the lobbyists, officials and operators in Washington – has signaled a willingness to fall in line behind the Donald, who indeed has begun to pick up establishment backing on the state level.

Can the Review leave a dent in Trump’s candidacy? He doesn’t sound too scared:

Review kicked out of debate

Here’s a good illustration of that intellectual-operational rift in the Republican party. Late last night the Review editor Jack Fowler announced that “a top official with the [Republican National Committee] called me to say that National Review was being disinvited” from co-hosting a 25 February Republican presidential debate. Fowler writes:

The reason: Our “Against Trump“ editorial and symposium. We expected this was coming. Small price to pay for speaking the truth about the Donald.

Horrible Iowa poll for Clinton

In case you missed it yesterday evening, CNN/ORC published a poll showing Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa 51%–43%, with 20% of respondents saying they were still trying to make up their minds. The same poll had Clinton ahead of Sanders 54-36 in December. Yikes for team Clinton.

Note that in polling averages maintained by Real Clear Politics, Clinton remains three points ahead in Iowa, while a recent poll by the gold-standard Des Moines register had her up by two points.

On the trail

Here’s how some of the Guardian team is deployed today: Ben Jacobs is in Iowa with Trump, where Adam Gabbatt is taking his leave; Sabrina Siddiqui and Megan Carpentier are traveling to New Hampshire women’s events with Clinton, and Dan Roberts is with Bernie Sanders. Columnist Jeb Lund, meanwhile, will contribute mini-reviews of the National Review #AgainstTrump essays as the morning goes on.

We have some new campaign ads to review this morning and there’s lots more to talk about. Thanks for reading!

Updated

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