Five takeaways from the last GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses

Happy new year! The Republicans are debating. Again.

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are the only two left. Donald Trump, now within Ms Haley’s striking distance in New Hampshire, is still hiding in the comparatively safe arms of a Fox News audience and host. Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy are gone. It’s just the would-be runners up, dueling for the title of “credible Trump alternative”.

With that extremely tired dynamic in mind, let’s take a look at what we learned tonight.

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley call each other liars for two hours

Did you know that you can go to DeSantisLies.com to read about the Florida governor’s record? If you didn’t, Nikki Haley will tell you until your ears bleed.

Facetious jokes aside, if there was one constant theme tonight, it was that you can’t trust either of the candidates, according to the candidates. Nikki Haley says you can’t trust Ron DeSantis and has built a whole website to explain why; she promoted it practically too many times to count on Wednesday evening. And Ron DeSantis says you can’t trust Nikki Haley — and has several clever quips which his comms team came up with to explain why.

At a certain point, such accusations become indistinguishable from background noise. Ms Haley may have come out slightly ahead here with an early-on dunk warning Drake University students not to play a drinking game with the Florida governor’s supposed dishonesty. But if you’re the serial fabricator currently running as the GOP frontrunner, and you watched tonight’s debate (after your own counter-programming concludes…), you have a lot to be happy about.

Speaking of…

Donald Who?

The prior debates have all played into this second theme to some degree, but boy did tonight drive it home. The