Donald Trump goes for Joe Biden’s jugular after Super Tuesday Republican rout

Donald Trump has begun a war on Joe Biden’s ­policy record after sealing the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Donald Trump has begun an all-out war on Joe Biden’s policy ­record – covering everything from immigration to climate change – as he cemented himself as the ­Republican Party’s presidential nominee in a sweep of Super Tuesday and kicked off his general election campaign.

As Mr Trump ended ex-UN ­ambassador Nikki Haley’s longshot bid for the White House, the former president is now turning his attention to the November election and picking a running mate to take on the US President and Kamala Harris.

Mr Trump won 14 of the 15 states that held Republican primaries on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), including Texas and California, snaring enough delegates to clinch the nomination outright within a fortnight.

His sole remaining rival, Ms Haley, won only the small northeastern state of Vermont, her second and potentially last victory after the District of Columbia, making it practically impossible for her to derail Mr Trump’s third bid for the White House.

The former Trump cabinet member was set to suspend her campaign on Wednesday morning (Thursday AEDT) and ensure Mr Trump’s nomination, despite her warnings as late as yesterday that Mr Trump was yet to convince a large swathe of Republican voters to back him.

Mr Trump delivered a rambling victory speech without a ­teleprompter, making no mention of Ms Haley, before party faithful at his private Florida club Mar-a-Lago a little after 10pm local time.

He declared Mr Biden the worst President in US ­history.

“They call it super Tuesday for a reason: this is a big one. This was an amazing night,” Mr Trump told fans to periodic cheers of “USA, USA”.

Promising to “take back our country”, Mr Trump vowed to make the US “greater than ever before”.

In potentially his biggest campaign moment before June’s Republican national convention, Mr Trump focused his attacks on Mr Biden’s handling of the Mexico border and claimed that cities were “overrun” by “Biden migrant crime”.

The Republican frontrunner also attacked Mr Biden over inflation, rising debt and his environmental policies, and claimed the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars would never have occurred if he had been re-elected in 2020.

“Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying, and we’re going to make America great again – greater than ever before,” he said. “We have a great Republican Party with tremendous talent and we want to have unity, and we’re going to have unity and it’s gonna happen very quickly.”

Ms Haley, who was in her home town of Charleston as the votes were tallied, said via a spokesman she was “honoured to have received the support of millions of Americans across the country today, including in Vermont where Nikki became the first ­Republican woman to win two presidential primary contests”.

“In state after state, there ­remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump,” the spokesman said. “Addressing those voters’ concerns will make the Republican Party and America better.”

US President Joe Biden speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Maryland, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

The statement left open if or when Ms Haley would withdraw.

Apart from the two most populous states, Mr Trump also won Virginia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Maine, Minnesota, Alaska, Colorado, Utah, Alabama, and Massachusetts, extending a string of victories that began in January in Iowa.

“Our country was coming together and now we have a very divided country,” Mr Trump said.

Referring to the series of criminal indictments against him, which appear if anything to have bolstered his political support, he added: “We have a country that a political person weaponises against his political opponent.”

The President, watching the results from the White House, said in a statement that Mr Trump would drag the US “backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office”.

“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is at risk,” Mr Biden said. “He is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people.”

Mr Biden easily won every primary on the Democrat side except for American Samoa, a US territory where little known local investor and entrepreneur Jason Palmer won four of the six available delegates.

In Minnesota about 20 per cent of Democrat primary voters opted for the “uncommitted” option, suggesting the state’s large share of Muslim and traditionally Democrat voters wanted to protest against the administration’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas, echoing the outcome in Michigan a week earlier.

Mr Trump’s success reflected numerous national and state-based polls that have accurately pointed to his growing dominance in the Republican Party and his increasing chance of defeating Mr Biden in November. These included a New York Times poll last week that gave Mr Trump 48 per cent support nationally to Mr Biden’s 43 per cent.

The former president, whose prospects were widely written off when he launched his third bid for the White House in November 2022, had amassed more than eight times as many delegates as Nikki Haley as The Australian went to press, putting him on track to secure the 1215 delegates required to guarantee his confirmation as the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in July in Milwaukee.

The Super Tuesday results extended a string of good fortune for the former president, following the Supreme Court’s decision this week to block state attempts to remove him from the ballot owing to his behaviour surrounding the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot.