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 almost all 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.
Trump could now cross the 1,215 delegate threshold as soon as next week, giving him the votes needed to officially be crowned the party’s candidate at the Republican National Convention this summer.
“For all intents and purposes, it’s over,” said Jim McLaughlin, Trump’s longtime pollster. “It’s over and then some. The Republicans are united. They are behind Donald Trump.”
With his mind now fixed on the contest against Joe Biden, Trump used most of a relatively restrained speech 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.”
Still, Trump has a thorn in his side thanks to his one-time ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, who, despite trailing him by a large margin in the delegate count and national opinion polls, has refused to suspend her campaign.
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 has 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 cites his mounting legal troubles — namely 91 charges spread across four looming criminal trials — as evidence of the “chaos” wrought by the former president.
Trump has often torn into Haley on the stump and on social media, referring to the former South Carolina governor as “birdbrain”. But the former president made no mention of her 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.”
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’s camp quickly rejected Trump’s overtures.
“Unity is not achieved by simply claiming ‘we’re united’,” said campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas in a statement on Tuesday night. “In state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump. That is not the unity our party needs for success.”
That message did not match the mood at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump supporters were unanimous that it was time for Haley to drop out of the race.
“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 did not hold any campaign events on Tuesday and has no further events on her public calendar or advertisements set to run on television in the coming days.
At the weekend, she suggested that she was no longer bound by a pledge she made last year to support whoever won the Republican party’s nomination, but many Trump allies expect Haley to fall in line.
“She will eventually endorse him,” said Florida-based Republican consultant Ford O’Connell, who is supporting Trump. “She understands the stakes. She sees the writing on the wall.”
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 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.”
