This concludes our coverage of the day in politics. Follow our live updates on the Republican debate – and Trump’s rival event – here.
A Saudi prince, multibillionaire and major News Corp stockholder has gotten into the fray with Donald Trump, in a surreal Twitter feud prompted by the New Yorker’s retweet of a photoshopped image.
The photoshopped image shows Fox host Megyn Kelly with prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, and text says a simple Google search will reveal the Saudi media mogul is a “co-owner” of Fox News.
A simple Google search instead turns up the work of estimable fact-checkers at Politifact, who in 2014 found the relationship between the prince and News Corp to be a little more complicated than conservative memes have it. The photo is fake, and the text mostly false.
In February last year bin Talal unloaded most of his stake in News Corp and retained 6.6% of his stake in 21st Century Fox – “co-owner” is decidedly overstating it.
Trump:You base your statements on photoshopped pics?I bailed you out twice;a 3rd time,maybe? https://t.co/Raco0mvusp https://t.co/jStBl7Ghia
— الوليد بن طلال (@Alwaleed_Talal) January 28, 2016
A negative political ad that dare not speak its name, save “I’m Bernie Sanders, and I approved this message.”
Rand Paul is speaking at a rally at Drake University in Des Moines. He invokes To Kill a Mockingbird and tells students that he’s the candidate for Americans who want to be left alone.
He says that this election reminds him of the character Scout, who “found the inner humanity that exists even in a mob bent on violence”. He says he’ll end the “mob intent on detention without trial”.
Paul goes on to say that he’s reminded of the book’s other hero, Atticus Finch, when he thinks about how the majority can be wrong; he leaves it unsaid that they can be wrong even in a democracy. “I thought of what Atticus said: before I can live with other folks, I’ve got to live with mysefl. The one thing that doesn’t abide majoity rule is conscience.”
Then he paraphrases Victor Hugo, maybe just for fun: “an idea whose time as come is stronger than all armies”.
He finishes off by calling for a bigger, more diverse Republican party: one that treats addiction “as a health problem, not an incarceration problem”; that reforms the criminal justice system and ends the war on drugs; that fights off big government and IRS Swat teams at every turn.
“Forty-eight federal agencies, from the IRS to the Department of Education, that all have their own Swat teams. Is that freedom?”
“No-o-o-o-o,” the crowd moans back. A cursory Google search casts some serious doubt on the notion that either the IRS or the DoE have “Swat teams”, though both agencies have enforcement agents.
“It’s the common desire to be left alone that binds us all as unique individuals,” Paul says. “After all big government hurts people from all walks of life, rich and poor.”
In 2016 your vote is not enough – politicians want your friends, your photos, your favorite TV shows and every click and keyboard tap you’ve ever made. Facebook has made itself available to help, for a fee.
My colleagues Harry Davies and Danny Yadron report from San Francisco.
Facebook, which told investors on Wednesday it was “excited about the targeting”, does not let candidates track individual users. But it does now allow presidential campaigns to upload their massive email lists and voter files – which contain political habits, real names, home addresses and phone numbers – to the company’s advertising network.
The company will then match in-real-life voters with their Facebook accounts, which follow individuals as they move across congressional districts and are filled with insightful data.
The data is encrypted and not maintained by Facebook after ads run, the company said. Acxiom, a massive data broker based in Little Rock, Arkansas, helps campaigns upload the voter info. But a campaign operative said the Texas senator has been using Facebook ads to raise money, among other things, and a Guardian analysis shows Cruz-affiliated donors are spending $10,000 per day on Facebook “placement” as the first vote nears.
The Cruz campaign has a Facebook operation in place to harvest voter data by issues – everything from immigration to fireworks – but they are not alone. Facebook is “playing a key role in shaping the public perception of a candidate definitely more so than in the past”, said Marie Danzig, former deputy digital director for the 2012 Obama campaign.
With campaigns estimated to spend more than $1bn in digital advertising, half on social media, Facebook stands to profit off its users enormously this year. CEO Sheryl Sandberg told investors on Wednesday that campaigns will be able to target by congressional district, interest, demographics, etc. “And we’re seeing politicians at all levels really take advantage of that targeting.”
You can read the full report through the link below.
”She failed me,” Susan Sarandon bemoaned of Hillary Clinton earlier today, referring to the then senator’s vote to support the US invasion of Iraq. “That wasn’t just a mistake, it was a disaster.”
The actor’s thrown her support behind Bernie Sanders, whose campaign lists her as one of his surrogates to talk to the media. She teared up introducing him on Thursday morning: “this may be the only man that can come up through the system, through the pipeline, unscathed, unsold and pure. And we know have the opportunity to make that man our choice for the president of the United States.”
“I got emotional just being with him,” she told CNN on Thursday. “Bernie Sanders consistently has represented everything that I’m interested in and care about.”
IT'S BERN TIME!! pic.twitter.com/PUKO6eeRCC
— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) January 28, 2016
Meanwhile, a senator who won cases in front of the supreme court of the United States of America is out doing this. And yet people don’t like him.
Here's @tedcruz's snap with his new @snapchat geofilter calling out @realDonaldTrump for skipping the #GOPDebate: pic.twitter.com/3Qkc9dT5lM
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorpNBC) January 28, 2016
Updated
Observations apropos Donald Trump’s alternate-debate-rally event/site, which Trump just linked to at DonaldTrumpForVets.com
- The camo-painted face of a young man looking serious and soldierly is in fact a Ukrainian actor in a stock photo by a Ukrainian photographer. The other photos are stock too (via Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski).
- “Trump could have his cake and eat it, too: he told people this afternoon he might go to debate tonight after his event” (via New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman … and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh).
- The charitable foundation to which DonaldTrumpForVets.com directs you to is the Donald J Trump Foundation, which between 2009 and 2013 gave only a tiny fraction of its total donations to veterans organizations. In those four years it gave $57,000 of $5.5m to veterans groups; the rest went to 291 other organizations (via Forbes’ Emily Canal, who dug up the tax forms).
- The billionaire has made no charitable contributions to his own Donald J Trump foundation since 2008, as of last August (via the Associated Press, also through tax filings).
- It’s not clear whether Trump has given to the Wounded Warrior Project, a huge and growing veterans charity, but he has also often said he will support “the wounded warriors”. A New York Times investigation heard from ex-staffers that the charity has a for-profit structure and spends massively on hotels, flights and meals.
So the fundraising site for Trump's veterans event says that all contributions go to the Donald J. Trump Foundation. pic.twitter.com/PYun6TuVsf
— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) January 28, 2016
Updated
Campaign entrances, Iowa edition.
DES MOINES — Here's one of the first things you see after walking into @BernieSanders' Iowa HQ pic.twitter.com/M8k5Gve58S
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) January 28, 2016
How many false alarms were there before the right guy walked in?
Just arrived in our Des Moines office HQ! Liberty is thriving! pic.twitter.com/BFx7k7si7R
— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 28, 2016
Republican savior, GOP Obama or something else entirely? Marco Rubio has tried to frame himself as the future of the conservative party but struggled to break free from the pack of his party. Seeing how voters have responded to Trump’s outrage and Cruz’s fear, Rubio’s gone dark. my colleague Sabrina Siddiqui reports from Des Moines:
When the senator reached his final stop on Wednesday, the mood was noticeably darker. He began with a joke about how his wife had come up with a solution for cold weather campaigning by gifting him the same sweater in every color for Christmas, but he soon pivoted to a more serious note.
“This is the first time we’ve had a president not interested in fixing the problems in America,” he said. “This is the first time that we have a president that believes that America is an arrogant global power that needed to be cut down to size.”
The portrait only grew bleaker. Obama, by his account, had left the country in ruins – damage so irreparable that simply electing any Republican might not be enough to reverse course.
“This is hard, but it’s the truth: America is a great nation in decline,” Rubio says. “We are not a weak country. We just have a weak president. And this year we are going to change that.”
You can read more about the senator’s strategy of out-despairing other Republicans, and his attempts to handle Trump et al from afar, down through the link below.
Also in Iowa, the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs finds irony in Rubio’s latest campaign line.
Worth noting as of now, both Rubio in 2016 and John Edwards in 2008 have the same campaign slogan "Tomorrow Begins Today"
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) January 28, 2016
The Democratic candidates may get more debates after all: the Clinton campaign is now calling for more stage appearances, the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler tweets.
For weeks the Democratic National Committee has ignored grumbling from Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who is inching along at under 2% in the polls. Both have suggested that the DNC is trying to limit airtime for Clinton’s rivals.
Both Clinton and Sanders camps are now both publicly calling for more debates than DNC scheduled
— Laura Meckler (@laurameckler) January 28, 2016
Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein has a statement from Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon.
Clinton campaign open to negotiations about April and May debates, @brianefallon says pic.twitter.com/l8t2YwKG1P
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 28, 2016
Is Hillary Clinton religious? Your answer might say more about you than her, according to a new Pew survey that found opinions largely trend along political lines.
For Americans who lean Democratic, 65% see Clinton as “very” or “somewhat” religious, compared with 27% who say she is “not too” or “not at all” religious.
For those who lean Republican, “these figures are almost exactly reversed: 65% say she is not religious, while just 28% say she is at least somewhat religious”.
Overall, this adds up to an American public that is split in its view of the role of religion in Clinton’s life. Roughly half of U.S. adults overall (48%) say Clinton is at least somewhat religious, while a slightly smaller share (43%) say she is not religious and 9% express no opinion.
Roughly half of all Americans (51%) say it’s important to have a president who shares their religious beliefs. However, sharing beliefs matters more to Republicans (64%) than to Democrats (41%).
If you’d like to read more about Clinton, Obama, Republicans and religion, check out what Pew’s got to say here.
Updated
Santorum and Huckabee join Trump
Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee will join Donald Trump at his alternate-debate event on Thursday, the Republican candidates’ campaigns have announced.
Santorum and Huckabee are hovering near zero in the polls, far below Trump’s 37.4% lead by national averages. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, is competing with Huckabee primarily for evangelical voters. They are polling at 0.5% and 2.4% respectively.
Huckabee appeared on CNN after announcing he would attend Trump’s event, saying: “it’s not an endorsement of Trump’s candidacy. I’m still running for president.”
Trump scheduled an fundraiser “to help the wounded warriors” on Wednesday, after he quit the Fox News debate scheduled for Thursday night. Trump pushed the network to keep anchor Megyn Kelly, who asked him pointed questions in the first Republican debate, from being a moderator, but Fox refused his demand in a mocking press release.
Updated
Rubio changes pitch: 'defeat Clinton'
Struggling to define himself in the race against billionaire Donald Trump, Cuban-Texan Ted Cruz and the specter of a young senator with a message of hope, Marco Rubio has boiled his campaign down to one aim: defeat Hillary Clinton.
Sabrina Siddiqui reports with the exclusive from Des Moines:
With days remaining before the Iowa caucuses, Marco Rubio is framing the choice before voters as boiling down to one thing: Defeating Hillary Clinton.
In a new television ad, shared first with the Guardian, Rubio focuses his closing argument on the need for change in the White House after two terms of Barack Obama.
“America is exceptional. Every generation before us met the great challenges of their time. But after seven long years of this president, we feel our country slipping away,” Rubio says, speaking straight to the camera.
“This election is about defeating Hillary Clinton and about saving what makes America unique. I’m Marco Rubio. I approved this message and I am asking for your vote so we can leave our children what our parents left us: the single greatest nation in all mankind.”
The ad will begin airing across Iowa on Thursday, five days before the state holds the first nominating contest in the 2016 presidential primaries.
Rubio is currently polling in third in Iowa behind Donald Trump and Texas senator Ted Cruz, and is widely regarded as the most likely candidate to break through as an alternative who would be palatable to both conservatives and the establishment.
The Florida senator has been traveling across Iowa since Saturday, honing in on electability as he makes his final pitch to voters. Several polls have shown Rubio as the more formidable Republican opponent to Clinton.
“If you nominate me, we won’t just unify the Republican Party, we will grow the conservative movement,” Rubio has said at a series of town halls and rallies this week. “I’m taking the conservative message to people that haven’t voted for us before.”
“We cannot lose this election,” he has added. “If Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States, the consequences will be extraordinary.
Updated
Trump-Fox spat reflects wider fight
Donald Trump would be the first to tell you he’s a man of many accomplishments. Somewhere down that tremendous list is one he probably didn’t predict: breaking the grip of Fox News over conservative media and scattering talking heads, bloggers and politicians across various tribes of pro- and anti-Trump thinking.
Trump’s feud with Fox over the anchor Megyn Kelly, whose incisive questions have aggravated the billionaire for months, reached a new low on Wednesday when he announced he would skip the network’s Thursday debate. But while Fox News kingpin Roger Ailes could once use his network to influence conservative voters and, arguably, shape the Republican party, Trump has baffled him and divided his audience.
The fractures are especially obvious online, where anyone can find kinship in the comments or on a blog. In the last 24 hours, for instance, the rightwing site Breitbart, founded by a man “committed to the destruction of the old media guard”, has churned out posts critical of Fox News.
The headlines blare in all-caps: “Fox News debate chief has daughter working for Rubio”, “How Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game”, “the anti-Trump network: Fox News money flows into open border group”.
The Blaze stakes out the opposite camp. There are invitations to read a letter from Ted Cruz to Trump, to watch Bill O’Reilly “take on Trump”, to hear how Glenn Beck “goes nuclear on ‘bully’ Donald Trump”, and to read “the words sexist Twitter trolls hurled at Megyn Kelly”.
Somewhere in the middle are sites like the Daily Caller, which has mostly reposted various opinions: there’s Fox’s Kelly and Krauthammer, support for Trump from Pat Buchanan, a conservative populist who won Iowa in 1996, and news about a veterans’ group that’s leery of Trump’s donations.
Or you can look at a kinkajou that fell asleep on a 99-year-old in Florida.
Matt Drudge, the conservative dungeon master behind the Drudge Report, has aggregated a menagerie from all sides. “O’Reilly begs: You owe me milkshakes”, “Jeb blew through is warchest”, “Huckabee calls Cruz a flip flopper”. There’s also a woman “who lives as a cat”, robot lettuce farmers, and “consumers of frozen vegetables [who] oppose abortions”.
The spat between Trump and Ailes reflects a larger war for control of the Republican party that has been playing out for months, if not years, and upended the order of conservative politics. Hoary magazines are reduced to ad hominem editions. Lifelong standard bearers of the party, like former speaker of the House John Boehner, have been ousted by irascible newcomers. The hate felt for one candidate and the ghosts of another have pushed even “establishment” leaders toward the mercurial, formerly liberal Trump.
Ailes and Fox News, mocked for telling an established version of the news – usually white, older and ideological – are now taking the journalistic high ground by supporting Megyn Kelly and her tough, pertinent questions. Similarly, liberal-leaning MSNBC has resisted the Democratic party’s attempt to limit debates. But the rise of more varied and radical voices online – and in the polls – suggests that the cable-news giants, like the leaders of both parties, are losing some influence over the masses they rely on.
Updated
Sanders is speaking at a high school in Iowa, where actors Justin Long and Susan Sarandon are in attendance near-ish the Guardian’s own DC bureau chief, Dan Roberts.
"Argue with your parents, argue with your teachers," Bernie Sanders tells high schoolers. My guess is less than half the audience can vote.
— Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) January 28, 2016
Sanders met with Barack Obama on Wednesday in the White House, and apparently they talked shop about campaigning in Iowa. Earlier this week the president heaped praise on the Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, and admitted that he didn’t know Sanders as well as his former secretary of state.
"I like Barack Obama. I met with him yesterday. We had a good chat. He's a nice guy," Bernie brings his Oval Office encounter to the trail.
— Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) January 28, 2016
Students in the audience – not exactly a room full of eligible voters – get to ask the senator from Vermont some questions. One says “I’ve never had any formal sex education.”
Sanders: “You’ve never had what?” (Dan says that he recovers after having not heard.)
One says climate change seems fake. “You’re wrong,” Sanders tells her, per the Washington Post. Another asks about the Middle East, in particular the war in Iraq. Sanders stresses that he wants to keep American soldiers out of conflicts there. “I went to funeral after funeral after funeral of kids not much older than you are.”
His campaign has also just released a letter about Sanders’ health from his doctor of 26 years. “You are in overall very good health and active in your professional work,” the doctor tells his patient, “and recreational lifestyle without limitation.”
Sanders flips on vote to protect gun-makers
Bernie Sanders has announced he will co-sponsor a bill to repeal protections to gun manufacturers and dealers – a law he voted for in 2005, and for which Hillary Clinton has criticized Sanders for weeks.
In 2005 Sanders voted for a bill that shields manufacturers and dealers from legal liability in cases “resulting from criminal or unlawful misuse” of their guns by a third party. Sanders was a member of the House of Representatives at the time, and 12 years earlier had voted against the Brady Bill, which imposed federal background checks and a waiting period on gun purchase.
The bill, named after Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady, paralyzed by an assassin’s gunshot meant for the president, eventually passed with Reagan’s endorsement.
Last year Sanders defended his vote on the liability bill, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), with an argument that guns are merely a tool like any other. “If somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer,” he told CNN, “and the murderer kills somebody with a gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible?
“Not any more than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beats somebody over the head with a hammer.”
Under the law, gun manufacturers and dealers have more protections than most other manufacturers of consumer goods.
On Wednesday staff for Sanders campaign met with Hector Adames, a gun control advocates who has joined with the Brady Campaign. Adames’ 13-year-old nephew was shot dead in a gun accident, and in 2009 the US supreme court rejected their challenge of protections for the gun industry.
In a call with reporters on Thursday, Adames said: “I can’t stop smiling, I’m almost in shock.”
Adames said he and other advocates hoped for Sanders “to make a wrong a right. That he responded so quickly is almost amazing.”
The Brady Campaign has endorsed Sanders’ rival, Hillary Clinton, and the group’s president, Dan Gross, said they still would “like to see him admit that his vote in 2005 was a mistake”.
“We hope that his co-sponsorship of this bill is a genuine step in the right direction,” he said, adding that “this would’ve been unthinkable a month ago.”
“The issue of gun violence prevention has reached a tipping point. We are winning.”
But Gross suggested that the group’s support for Clinton would not waver because she “didn’t wait until the campaign to champion gun violence prevention”.
Gun violence and gun control have been almost entirely absent from national politics since 2013, when Congress failed to pass a bill requiring universal background checks. By the measure of one tracker, there have been more than 1,000 mass shootings since the December 2012 attack that killed 20 children and six adults and spurred the 2013 bill. The issue has not been debated seriously between presidential campaigns in 15 years, though it has been raised repeatedly in this Democratic primary.
Updated
Debate preview from the Donald.
The "debate" tonight will be a total disaster - low ratings with advertisers and advertising rates dropping like a rock. I hate to see this.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2016
And the Stooges.
Republican debate night preview pic.twitter.com/YhxXekKb0y
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 28, 2016
Checking in with other Republicans on the trial, here’s New Jersey governor Chris Christie talking about Donald Trump’s habit of calling cable morning shows.
“He sits in his jammies in Trump Tower and phones in. You guys don’t let any of the rest of us do that,” Christie told Fox News on Wednesday night. “He phones in to every darn show. None of the rest of us do that.”
Christie said that Trump was making a “big mistake” with his decision to “whine and moan and complain and walk away” from the Fox News debate. You can check out the whole exchange on Sean Hannity’s show here.
This morning, Kentucky senator Rand Paul is on the radio and the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel is sitting listening to his libertarian-ish drawl.
Rand Paul on Iowa radio. CALLER: There seems to be a media blackout of your campaign. Is that your strategy? PAUL: Definitely not.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 28, 2016
Paul told CNN this morning that he plans to win the election with a “secret weapon”: “the youth vote”.
Enjoyed being in studio this morning in Iowa with Jeff Angelo on whoradio. pic.twitter.com/RQay2vi1jF
— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 28, 2016
Influential Iowa governor Terry Branstad is at a Wall Street Journal breakfast this morning and talking to a room full of reporters. Although the Republican says he won’t endorse anyone, he has made his disdain for Ted Cruz clear.
The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker is listening in.
Iowa Gov. Branstad says he’s not endorsing anyone, playing host to everyone, but is ripping Cruz for opposing renewable fuels standard.
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) January 28, 2016
Branstad says that he thinks Donald Trump’s slogan, to “make America great again”, has “resonated” with a lot of Republican voters. He’s careful about criticizing the billionaire, talking up the big crowds that are showing up for Trump’s rallies and suggesting his state will have record turnout on 1 February.
Branstad says he has “concerns” about Trump’s comments on Mexicans, Muslims, POWs. He’s “absolutely astounded” Trump’s poll #s held up.
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) January 28, 2016
Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. The last debate before primary season voting begins takes place tonight: one last chance for Republicans to show that they’re better/worse than Donald Trump … or at least his empty podium.
On Wednesday, Trump confirmed that he’ll skip the debate in Des Moines because he doesn’t like “the wise-guy press releases” of host Fox News (or the awkward questions of Fox anchor Megyn Kelly).
Ted Cruz, Trump’s closest competitor in the Iowa polls (where people will finally decide an election on 1 February), promptly challenged Trump to a debate “mano a mano”, which means “hand to hand” but in Republican Spanglish reads as “manly emasculation contest”. Carly Fiorina, polling around 2% (34 points behind Trump), offered the billionaire $2m to do a one-on-one debate.
But Trump says he’ll hold a competing event to “raise some money for the wounded warriors”. Cruz donors said they would give $1.5m to veterans if Trump debates their man, and Bush put down $20 that Trump will show for Fox. The other Republicans – Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, etc – still plan to show up for the Des Moines debate.
On the other side of the race, the Red Hot Chili Peppers announced they will headline a fundraiser for Bernie Sanders, who also has Killer Mike, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West and Ben & Jerry in his camp. Hillary Clinton held a fundraiser with Jon Bon Jovi in Philadelphia on Wednesday, so the competition for 80s rockers who went pop heavy in the 90s is fierce.
Clinton leads Sanders in Iowa by less than a point, according to averaged polls, and trails the Vermont senator by 15 in New Hampshire by the same measure. Nationally, however, the former secretary of state has held her double-digit lead despite Sanders’ incremental gains.
A new poll has Trump ahead of Cruz by seven in Iowa, and Sanders up by 20 over Clinton in New Hampshire.
Around the trail:
Sabrina Siddiqui has shadowed Marco Rubio in New Hampshire, where the senator is going dark, presenting a gloomy future about any America that doesn’t have him in charge. Sabrina and Gary Younge will be with Clinton this afternoon.
DC bureau chief Dan Roberts is in Iowa after a day of watching a New York media tycoon take on a New York real estate tycoon. He’ll be with Sanders today.
Ben Jacobs will be with Republican senator Rand Paul, who’s likely eager to take on Cruz in the debate and take back some skeptical voters from the Texas senator.
West coast bureau chief Paul Lewis has infiltrated the headquarters of camp Cruz, learning what he can ahead of tonight’s debate.
