Donald Trump celebrated his latest string of victories on home turf on Tuesday night, addressing hundreds of supporters who had packed a gilded ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” the former president said at a podium flanked by a dozen American flags. “This is a big one. They tell me, the pundits and otherwise, that there’s never been one like this. There’s never been anything so conclusive.”
Trump comfortably won all but one of the states up for grabs in the biggest day of the primary calendar on Tuesday, racking up hundreds more delegates that will help him become his party’s official nominee for the White House.
By Wednesday morning, Trump’s last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, announced she was pulling out of the race after winning just two state primaries in the campaign.
Trump is also likely by next week to formally cross the 1,215 delegate threshold he needs to be crowned the party’s candidate at the Republican National Convention this summer.
“It’s over and then some,” said Jim McLaughlin, Trump’s longtime pollster. “The Republicans are united. They are behind Donald Trump.”
Even Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader who endured years of friction with Trump, endorsed the former president on Wednesday morning, tartly acknowledging that he had the “requisite support” to be the party’s nominee.
With his mind now fixed on the contest against President Joe Biden, Trump used most of a relatively restrained speech on Tuesday night to rehearse themes that he will deploy against the president in the coming months — including on immigration, high inflation and foreign conflicts.
“Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying,” Trump said in a voice that sounded hoarse at times. “And we’re going to make America great again, greater than ever before.”
Despite her subsequent withdrawal from the presidential race, Haley pulled off an upset in Vermont’s Republican primary on Tuesday night, notching her second primary victory after winning in the District of Columbia at the weekend.
She had attacked Trump in recent weeks and insisted that her primary results across the country have shown that a significant minority of Republicans do not want Trump to be their party’s nominee.
She had cited his mounting legal troubles — namely 91 charges spread across four looming criminal trials — as evidence of the “chaos” wrought by the former president.
Trump made no mention of Haley in his Mar-a-Lago speech on Tuesday, appealing instead for the party to unite behind him.
“We have a great Republican party with tremendous talent, and we want to have unity, and we are going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly,” Trump said. “I have been saying lately, success will bring unity to our country.”
But by Wednesday morning, Trump had reverted to lashing out, saying in a social media post that Haley had been “trounced” after being funded by “radical left Democrats”. Yet he also made a direct appeal to her supporters, saying he invited them to “join the greatest movement in the history of our nation”, and that Biden was the “enemy”.
It was another sign that Trump is now focused on his rematch with Biden, a contest that will require him to project a more moderate image that appeals to the centrist Republicans and independent swing voters that he will need to win the election.
Haley, who exit polls suggest drew support from exactly the kind of swing voters that will be needed to win in November, stopped short of endorsing Trump on Wednesday morning. She said it was now up to Trump to “earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him”.
“At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away,” she added. “And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing.”
That message did not match the mood at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, where Trump supporters insisted that Haley’s brand of conservatism had already been roundly rejected by the Republican base.
“The primary is over,” said Armando Ibarra, chair of the Miami Young Republicans, who attended Trump’s election night party with his wife. “I think it is very clear that the country is ready for a change, and for the people, that is Donald Trump. It is time for her to get out.”
Haley on Wednesday said she looked forward to returning to life as “private citizen” — but did not completely close the door to throwing her weight behind the former president between now and November.
“She will eventually endorse him,” said Florida-based Republican consultant Ford O’Connell, who is supporting Trump. “She understands the stakes.”
The Trump campaign has been buoyed in recent weeks by opinion polls that suggest he is in a strong position to beat Biden this year. A New York Times/Siena College poll published at the weekend found that a majority of Biden’s 2020 supporters now think he is too old to be president.
But even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters acknowledge the former president has work to do to broaden his appeal.
Franco D’Andrea, a Trump supporter from Horsham, Pennsylvania, who flew to Mar-a-Lago to hear the former president speak on Tuesday, said he did not want Trump to say anything that might “alienate people”.
“I think he has got to try and bring in suburban women, for sure,” D’Andrea said. “If he can tone down the rhetoric a little bit, I think he can bring a lot of them back.”
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