Donald Trump tightens his grip on the Republican party

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. 

With 251 days until the election, Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican party is getting stronger by the day. 

Trump was smug after crushing Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina. With almost all the ballots counted from Saturday’s Republican primary, Trump had 59.8 per cent of the vote to Haley’s 39.5 per cent. So resounding was Trump’s victory that the Associated Press called the race right as the polls closed in the Palmetto State.

And bowing to pressure from Trump, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel announced yesterday that she would step down next week. The former president wants a new leadership team — one that includes his daughter-in-law — at the group that coordinates party strategy and has its own fundraising machine.

Over the weekend, Trump held court at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) outside Washington, basking in the frenzy of the annual gathering that was all about him this year.

Trump fed conference-goers the red meat they craved. His speech fried up messages of victimhood and political retribution that have become his campaign’s main course since he was served with 91 criminal charges from state and federal prosecutors. For dessert, he called himself a “political dissident”, comparing himself to Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison earlier this month.

And in his primary victory speech that night, he did not even mention Haley, despite her vowing to stay in the race until at least Super Tuesday (on March 5). Instead, he turned his sights on Joe Biden and the general election with the Republican primary race all but over. [Free to read.]

“We’re going to look at Joe Biden, we’re going to look him straight in the eye — he’s destroying our country — and we’re going to say ‘Joe, you’re fired! Get out, Joe!” Trump said in Columbia, South Carolina. “I have never seen the Republican party so unified as it is right now.”

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But Trump’s margin of victory masked disunity lurking in the Republican electorate. Polls had projected an even bigger loss for Haley and, as she said, her vote share was not insignificant.

“[Forty] per cent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative,” Haley told supporters at her own election night party in Charleston on Saturday.

One 58-year-old South Carolinian woman told the FT’s Lauren Fedor that while she voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, she could no longer “trust him”.

“I think he is a person of horrible moral character and treats women terribly,” she said. “I think he would be the worst decision.”

But the woman, a registered Republican, also conceded that she would vote for Trump in a Biden rematch, though she “would be disgusted”.

“They are too old,” she added. “Biden is not competent and Trump is a lunatic.”

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Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• Biden said yesterday he was hopeful that a temporary Gaza ceasefire could begin next week. The war is increasingly unpopular among the Democratic base — particularly in Michigan (home to a large Arab-American population), which holds its primary today. (FT, Politico)

• Trump and Biden both head to the US-Mexico border on Thursday as immigration becomes an increasingly dominant topic in the White House race.

• The US oil and gas industry, which gives tens of millions of dollars to Republicans each election cycle, thinks a Biden re-election would be “disastrous” for the sector despite gangbusters profits during his presidency.

• Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has asked a judge for a gag order against Trump to keep him from publicly disparaging jurors, witnesses, lawyers or court staff in the run-up to his first criminal trial in March.

• A key developer of Trump’s 2020 fake electors plot hid from prosecutors a secret Twitter (now X) account, undercutting his previous testimony. (CNN)

• US campaign groups are spending millions on micro-influencers who could target political messages to their small, niche online followings [Free to read].

Behind the scenes

Cpac, the annual gathering of US rightwing activists, was more like TrumpFest this year, as the event was swallowed up by the former president, his allies and his ideas.

Multiple vice-presidential contenders paraded through the convention, in what seemed like an audition for the second slot on the ticket.

In a Cpac straw poll, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were the crowd’s top choices to be Trump’s No. 2. Former Hawaii Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik came in third and fourth.

“They say he will be the dictator-in-chief, that if he’s elected it will be the last election this country sees. It’s laughable,” said Gabbard.

In the hallways, the FT’s James Politi spotted one attendee, Suzanne Monk, wearing a bright orange T-shirt calling for the pardon of the Trump supporters who face criminal charges or convictions after storming the US Capitol to overturn the 2020 election result.

“Many of them did nothing more than be physically present, they did not commit acts of violence, they were let in through open doors,” she said.

As for what Trump should do if he wins another White House term? “We need to do some housecleaning with regards to our judiciary,” she said.

Datapoint

Haley spent twice as much as Trump on ads in Iowa and New Hampshire, and more than $10mn more than the former president in South Carolina. But she’s failed to convert that cash into enough votes.

She has tapped deep-pocketed donors who like her brand of Reaganite conservatism and think she has a better chance than Trump of beating Biden in November.

But following her home state defeat, she lost a big source of funding: Americans for Prosperity Action, a political spending group backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. It is a big blow for a campaign that is on its last legs. 

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AFP played a significant role in carrying Haley’s campaign until this point, contributing just under 20 per cent of spending on ads for her this year.

But it seems AFP’s wariness emerged before it announced the end of its funding when its ad spending for Haley levelled off earlier this month. But this does not mean AFP will start funnelling money to Trump.

The group said while it continued to “endorse” Haley for president, it would “focus our resources where we can make the difference”, namely congressional races throughout the country, as Republicans seek to take back the US Senate from Democrats. 

Viewpoints

• Haley’s tenacity against Trump shows she wants to be the long-term standard-bearer of Republicans who reject the former president, writes Ed Luce.

• Trump still likes tariffs, notes the FT’s Soumaya Keynes, but a second term could feature a different approach.

• Rana Foroohar and Peter Spiegel discuss how education has become a political battleground in the US. [Available for Premium subscribers]