Four candidates were on the campaign trail, meeting and greeting voters in frigid Iowa. A fifth was sitting in a courtroom in rainy Washington, trying to fend off a criminal case that might land him in jail.
But in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world of American politics, it is Donald Trump – not Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson or Vivek Ramaswamy – who is expected to win the first Republican presidential nominating contest in a landslide next week.
