The reality has been clear for weeks, ever since former President Donald J. Trump crushed his opponents across the frozen fields and icy highways of Iowa. But his stunning win on Saturday in South Carolina, where he defeated Nikki Haley in her home state, makes it anything but official.
The Republican nomination contest is not a competition. It’s a coronation.
This winter’s party primaries represented the best chance for Republicans opposed to the former president to oust him from his dominant position in the GOP. The stakes were extraordinarily high: Many of his Republican opponents see Mr. Trump as, at best, unelectable and unelectable and, at worst, a threat to the foundations of American democracy.
But as the campaign has progressed through the early nominating contests, the race has revealed not Mr. Trump’s weaknesses but rather the enduring nature of his iron-fisted grip on the Republican Party. From the backrooms of Capitol Hill to the town halls of New Hampshire to the courtrooms of New York City, Mr. Trump shows no signs of being shaken from his position of control in the party — not in 2024 and not in the foreseeable future.
“I think the party will be done with Trump when Trump is done with the party,” said David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist who opposes Mr. Trump. “That’s all.”
All of Mr. Trump’s main rivals, except Ms. Haley, have given up and supported his candidacy. He captured the state parties and the Republican National Committee, installed loyalists in key positions and won the support of large numbers of Republican elected officials. And what once seemed like extraordinary political strains — the 91 articles of impeachment against him, his increasingly extreme rhetoric, his role in the Capitol riots on Jan. 6 — have only served to strengthen his support among the Republican faithful.
With his victory on Saturday, Mr. Trump has won all of the primary nominating contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the U.S. Virgin Islands, South Carolina — an unprecedented feat in a competitive primary race. He heads into Super Tuesday on March 5, when a third of all delegates to the GOP convention will be awarded at “maximum speed,” said South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, who supported Mr. Trump over his predecessor, Ms. Haley.
Ms. Haley has vowed to stay in the race and plan events in Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah in the coming days. On Saturday evening, she argued that large swaths of the Republican primary electorate still wanted an alternative to Mr. Trump.
“You have the right to a real election, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate,” she told her supporters at her election night party. “And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
Ms. Haley is right: In Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Trump won with about half the vote, suggesting his support may have a ceiling even within his own party. In polls and surveys, Haley supporters expressed negative views of Mr. Trump, suggesting that a faction of the Republican coalition has concerns about the former president.
But these Trump skeptics do not represent the majority of the party. They also weren’t enough for Ms. Haley to win a primary race, leaving her running a campaign that many Republican strategists and officials believe is headed toward inevitable defeat.
“This is the fastest primary process in as long as I can remember,” said Ron Kaufman, a Republican presidential strategist who has been involved in primary campaigns since Ronald Reagan ran for office in 1976. “There is no one who doesn’t see Trump as a candidate,” including Nikki Haley. Like it or not, everyone understands that they are the perceived candidate.”
Barring a surprise in the spring — a stressful health scare, a legal event — Mr. Trump appears to be on a fast track to the Republican nomination. It is a reality that shows how Mr. Trump has led his party — and the nation — into a new era in which once-unthinkable policies and rhetoric have become standard. Mr. Trump has pursued a break with NATO, carried out mass deportations and prosecuted his political enemies.
But despite his promises not to be a dictator “except on day one” and to dismantle core elements of American governance, democracy and the rule of law, Republicans have not only stood by the former president but also rewarded him with electoral victories.
“Trump’s power in the Republican Party is extraordinary – he makes people defy common sense,” said Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat. “It’s breathtaking.”
Republican opponents of Mr Trump insisted he could be defeated if the race was limited to a one-on-one contest. They argued that the mistake of 2016 was that his rivals stayed in the race too long, allowing him to win with a majority by splitting the votes against him.
This year, several of Mr. Trump’s rivals failed before voting began. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once considered his strongest opponent, ended his campaign in humiliation.
That left Ms. Haley as Mr. Trump’s only competitor, creating the hand-to-hand competition his opponents had long hoped for. In the final days of the race in South Carolina, she stepped up her attacks on the former president — following what Trump opponents, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, had said was the strategy that could defeat him.
Still, she failed to win in New Hampshire, perhaps the most favorable terrain for her bid given the large presence of independent voters and moderate Republicans participating in the party’s primaries. In the Nevada primary, in which Trump did not participate, she lost to “none of these candidates.”
Her loss in South Carolina was particularly damaging because it came from voters who perhaps knew her better than anywhere else in the country. Her home state rejected her by a double-digit majority. She appeared to win only a handful of districts in the state that were home to larger numbers of moderate, college-educated white independents.
Mr. Trump’s dominance is not just limited to the election campaign. On Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a straw poll of Mr. Trump’s potential vice presidential candidates overshadowed the presidential nomination poll — a poll that Mr. Trump won with 94 percent.
On Capitol Hill earlier this month, Mr. Trump opposed the long-awaited border bill, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican and minority leader, reversed course and endorsed the bill.
And even Mr. Trump’s most inflammatory statements no longer provoke the mild recriminations within his party that once occurred during his presidency. Many of these critics have resigned, retired or been driven to political defeat with the help of Mr. Trump.
When the former president compared his criminal charges to the situation of Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison, Republicans did not react.
When Mr. Trump suggested he had threatened to encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell it wants” toward a NATO ally that had defaulted on its financial obligations, European leaders responded with concern and public rebukes. Republicans shrugged their shoulders.
Nor did they reject Mr. Trump’s comments at CPAC on Saturday in which he harshly attacked his political opponents and portrayed himself – a former president and figurehead of his party – as a “political dissident.”
“I stand before you today, not only as your former and hopefully future president, but also as a proud political dissident,” he said. “I am a dissident.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s opponents have tried in recent days to find reasons for his apparent invincibility.
In a private call released to reporters, Mr. DeSantis suggested to his campaign supporters that conservative media outlets were responsible for supporting Mr. Trump and said they would hold “no accountability” to the former president.
“He said at some point he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing a vote,” DeSantis said, referring to Mr. Trump. “Well, I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and the conservative media wouldn’t even cover it.”
Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a moderate Republican who supports Ms. Haley, said Mr. Trump won the primary because of media coverage of his legal jeopardy and court appearances.
“That’s what I told the people at CNN and Fox, you continue to support this guy,” Mr. Sununu said. “You keep emphasizing the fact that he’s on trial, you keep making him the victim, and he only wins because he’s the victim himself, and he loves it. He knows how to play it very, very well.”
The reality may be far more fundamental than media coverage. Despite the political risk, a majority of Republican voters like Mr. Trump. And in this primary campaign, that might just be enough.
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2024-02-25 10:04:55
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