Littwin: On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, it's pretty obvious that Republicans have blown it once again

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : And if she survived New Hampshire, she'd next have to go to her home state of South Carolina, where Trump is easily leading in all the polls.
53% : The judge had reluctantly given Trump permission to address the court following his lawyers' closing arguments, but only if he followed the rules.
48% : Jake Tapper, one of the CNN moderators, asked Haley whether Trump had the character to be president.
47% : And if Trump, who has refused to debate, had been watching -- he was actually doing a fact-free, counter-programming town hall on Fox, which, by the way, had double the ratings of the debate -- he would have had to laugh.
47% : I mean, Haley's non-answer came just days after Trump went full birther again, this time sharing a post from a far-right-wing website claiming that Haley wasn't eligible to run for president despite the fact that she was born -- although we haven't seen her birth certificate -- in South Carolina.
45% : Not the GOP voters who will inevitably line up behind Trump.
44% : And then as if to clear things up, she added: "His way is not my way."
41% : Of course, that would be a distant second, 30 points or so behind Trump.
38% : I don't need to list all the times that Republicans could have walked away from Trump and failed to do so.
36% : So it is that on Monday, unless the polling is completely wrong, Iowa Republicans will take the first official step of 2024 toward reinstalling Trump as the GOP nominee for president/would-be dictator.
34% : I don't think Trump would go that far.
33% : I don't need to list all the leading Republicans who stood by as Trump took over their party and reduced it to a platform for bigotry, hate, vengeance, lawlessness, demagoguery and now a full-on authoritarian threat to democracy.
28% : "And the thing about this race, though, is that Trump has never been an easier target -- or a more dangerous one -- than he is today.
27% : You could also call it the hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil primary, in which would-be opponents have refused to actually run against Trump.
25% : And now Christie states the obvious, "Anyone who is unwilling to say that (Trump) is unfit to be the president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.
24% : That future president might also want to read up on the 14th Amendment, and not just Section 3, which the Colorado Supreme Court has used to rule Trump ineligible for the Colorado ballot.
23% : "Christie has been there, having shamelessly endorsed Trump in 2016.
23% : Trump sat in the courtroom and watched as his lawyer tried to make the case that a president could only be tried for a crime after his presidency if he had been impeached and convicted while president.
22% : But this Republican primary, coming nine years after Trump walked down the gilded escalator to announce his first presidential campaign, is probably the most damning example of Trump enablement.
19% : The idea that Trump would be vulnerable against Haley in a two-way race is hard to accept.
15% : But now he's still trying to shame Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, the only semi-legitimate Trump opponents left in what passes for a primary race, for failing to take on Trump.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.