Super Tuesday: ‘Greater than before’: Donald Trump sweeps primaries

Donald Trump’s spectacular political comeback continues as he wins nearly all the 15 Republican primaries, snaring enough delegates to clinch the nomination within a fortnight.

Donald Trump has all but cemented himself as the Republican party’s presidential candidate after sweeping the field on Super Tuesday, practically ending Nikki Haley’s bid for the White House and setting up a bitter, personal rematch with Joe Biden in November.

The former president’s spectacular political comeback continued in earnest on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) after he won 14 of the 15 states that held Republican primaries, including Texas and California, snaring enough delegates to clinch the nomination outright within a fortnight.

His sole remaining rival, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, won only Vermont, a small northeastern state, her second and potentially last win after the District of Columbia, making it practically impossible for her to derail the former president’s third bid for the White House.

Mr Trump delivered a rambling victory speech without a teleprompter, making no mention of Ms Haley, before the party faithful at his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida a little after 10pm local time, declaring Joe Biden the worst president in American history.

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

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

Nikki Haley, who was in her hometown of Charleston as the votes were tallied, via a spokesman said 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 contest”.

“In state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump. Addressing those voters’ concerns will make the Republican Party and America better,” the spokesman added, leaving open the question of if or when Haley would withdraw.

New York Times best-selling author Jeff Greenfeld on social media characterised Haley’s dim prospects: “There are fewer voters in Vermont than at the last Australian Taylor Swift concert,” he said.

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, which prompted Florida governor Ron DeSantis to withdraw from the race.

“Our country was coming together and now we have a very divided country. We have a country that a political person weaponises against his political opponent,” Mr Trump said in his roughly 20 minute long remarks, referring to the series of criminal indictments against him, which appear if anything to have bolstered his political support.

Mr Trump, seeking to pivot his campaign away from Ms Haley toward the incumbent president, blamed Mr Biden for his alleged failure to secure the southern border with Mexico, inflation, the outbreak of wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and rising debt.

The president, watching the results from the White House, said in a statement 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. He is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people,” the President said.

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 around 20 per cent of Democrat primary voters opted for “uncommitted”, 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, including 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 delates as Nikki Haley as The Australian went to press, putting him on track to secure the 1,215 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 6th 2021 Capitol Hill riot.