The 2024 Republican primaries ended on the night of the Iowa Caucuses, but it’s truly over now, though some people are having trouble coping with reality. Nikki Haley is like one of those people from Hoarders: she can’t let go of the baggage, the stuff representing her presidential ambitions. With Trump on his way to winning the 2024 GOP nomination and Haley’s inability to walk away from a primary contest that’s over, it’s now a worthless journey. Still, Ms. Haley is persistent in offering GOP voters a choice, even though the majority has spoken, and they want Trump, not her.
It was an early night for the former president, with the race being called a mere two minutes after the polls closed in the Palmetto State at 7 PM EST. The victory speech was a little under 30 minutes, where Trump thanked his supporters, some VIPs on stage, and hoped to utter these words to Joe Biden soon: you’re fired (via Fox News):
Former President Trump touted a "bigger win than we anticipated" in the South Carolina Republican Primary Saturday night, saying he looks forward to looking at President Biden in November and saying: "Joe, you’re fired."
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"This is really something. This was a little sooner than we anticipated and an even bigger win than we anticipated," Trump said. "And I was just informed that we got double the number of votes that has ever been received in the great state of South Carolina."
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Trump then began highlighting the "horror" of the "millions and millions of people coming across the border illegally."
"We don’t know where they come from, they come from jails and they come from prisons — they come from all sorts of places," Trump said. "We’re not going to stand for it — you have terrorists coming in."
Trump vowed to "straighten things out."
"The border is the worst it’s ever been," he said. "We’re going to fix it — fix it very quickly."
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Trump said he has "never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now-- it's never been like that."
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Trump was on stage with his family— his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump; his sons Barron, Donald Jr., Eric; his daughters Ivanka and Tiffany; his sons-in-law Jared Kushner, and Michael Boulos; his daughter-in-law Lara Trump; and Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Now, is the party unified? Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) got booed when Trump wanted him to take the podium to say a few things. It’s a minor hiccup, though. The GOP base wants revenge for the 2020 loss and wants Biden out. Right now, the former president is the only one in a position to do that; Nikki has won no primaries and has zero delegates. It’s no longer a choice anymore.
You could argue that the FBI gift-wrapped the nomination to Trump when they raided Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022 and did unite the party like never before in outrage over the federal ransacking, with some alleging it was done to find a certain binder compiled by House investigators under the watchful eye of the CIA that detailed the many illegal spy activities into Trump associates that predates the FBI’s official counterintelligence probe that was seen as the starting point for the Russian collusion hoax.
The legal baggage is what I thought could be a problem, but as we’ve seen with many things Trump-related, time tends to tilt in his favor. The two federal cases by Special Counsel Jack Smith might be delayed until after the election. The Georgia election RICO case by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is under the microscope for ethics violations. The Alvin Bragg case, which relates to payments to Stormy Daniels, starts soon, but it’s the weakest one.
Time has degraded Joe Biden’s mental health, with the report filed by Special Counsel Robert Hur noting the president’s inability to remember his vice presidency or when Beau Biden died. The report found that the president willfully retained classified materials and divulged them—Biden told his ghostwriter—but he couldn’t be charged because he was too old and senile. Eighty-six percent think Biden is too old to run again, whereas 61 percent don’t believe he deserves a second term. This report focused on that voter problem, and the president’s advisers don’t have many options in addressing it—you can’t de-age the president. On policy matters, time has allowed voters to take stock of Biden's domestic and foreign policy agenda, neither of which are popular.
All these issues can have Trump’s full attention, as his campaign messaging should shift into general election mode. Super Tuesday will again yield more victories, as the former president is up big in virtually every primary that day. I’m sure when Nikki Haley doesn’t win anything again; she’ll trot out the same lines about how voters don’t want Trump and Biden while leaving out the obvious: no one wants you around. Republican voters are backing Trump; he’s won primaries and caucuses and has delegates. Haley has nothing, and the former South Carolina governor will look ridiculous if she keeps spinning these blowout losses as wins amid zero victories on Super Tuesday, where Trump is projected to win two dozen more states handily.
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