Former president Donald Trump didn’t even bother to mention former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley after turning in a dominant performance on Super Tuesday, opting instead to devote his victory speech to a series of blistering attacks on Joe Biden that offer a glimpse at the former president’s general-election strategy.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason — this is a big one,” Trump said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. “They tell me, the pundits and otherwise, that there’s never been one like this. There’s never been anything so conclusive. This was an amazing night.”
Skipping right over Haley, who managed to eke out a win in the Vermont presidential primary to deny Trump a clean sweep Tuesday night, the former president moved immediately to attacking Biden for turning the U.S. into “a third world country.”
Trump called Biden the “worst president” in U.S. history and criticized the current administration for its lenient open-border policies that have let in at least 10 million illegal immigrants since 2021. He then pointed to a new bombshell report, which found that the White House directly transported over 320,000 illegal immigrants into the country via airplane, as another example of Biden’s exacerbation of the border crisis.
The presumptive GOP nominee laid blame on Biden for the nation’s numerous problems such as record crime, including those committed by migrants, and high inflation. He also attacked Biden over his age and apparent physical frailty and blamed the incumbent president for undoing his successes, previewing a line of attack that he’ll likely lean on heavily in the months to come.
“We had everything going so beautifully. When Joe Biden goes to the beach, because somebody on his staff thinks he looks very good in a bathing suit, until he can’t get his feet out of the sand or lift the chair, which weighs about nine ounces,” Trump said. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have just gone to the beach, he would have had tremendous success at the border and elsewhere. So we’re going to take back our country.”
By the conclusion of his victory speech, Trump had already won at least eleven of the 15 Super Tuesday states: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maine, Alabama, Massachusetts, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, and Minnesota.
Shortly after 11 p.m. ET, only three states remained without a winner: California, Alaska, and Utah.
Trump’s overwhelming victory came two days after Haley led Trump by 30 points in Washington, D.C. This was the first state that Haley won after suffering a series of consecutive losses in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, the Virgin Islands, Michigan, Missouri, and Idaho. On Monday night, Trump once again defeated Haley in the North Dakota primary.
The presumptive winner of the GOP presidential nomination will need to earn a total of 1,215 delegates. While Trump won’t be able to mathematically eliminate Haley with his Super Tuesday wins, his dominant performance upends any path to victory she may have had.