David Goldman/AP Photo
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at an election night rally on primary election night in Nashua, New Hampshire, Tuesday, January 23, 2024.
Jean-Luc Godard once admitted that despite his efforts to revolutionize cinema, he actually adhered to the world’s oldest narrative rules, as laid down by Aristotle. “I believe a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he said. “Though not necessarily in that order.”
This year’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-them Republican presidential primaries feature several candidates who proclaim their story is just beginning or sailing along in the middle, when it’s actually at its end. Ron DeSantis left Iowa, where he’d finished a distant second to Donald Trump, telling supporters he was off to South Carolina and further adventures. In the colder light of morning, he realized no one would fund the continuation of his fool’s errand, and he dropped out of the race.
Last night, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley made essentially the same vow. She, too, would head off to South Carolina after losing New Hampshire to Donald Trump by what looks to be around an 11-point margin. Had only Republicans been permitted to vote in the state’s primary, the exit poll tells us, Trump would have received a whopping 74 percent of the vote to Haley’s 24 percent. But New Hampshire also allows independents to vote in their primaries, a smaller group that Haley carried by a 3-to-2 margin, 60 percent to 38 percent.
Most of the 48 states yet to be heard from don’t let independents into their Republican primaries.
Democrats may wish that Haley persists, as she has now settled into a groove wherein she assails Trump’s mental acuity. Since Trump claims he still has all his marbles, she said last night, he “should have no problem standing on a debate stage with me.”
“The first party that retires its 80-year-old candidate is that party that’s going to win the election,” she added. (Trump’s 77, but you get the drift.) Fortunately for Joe Biden’s electoral prospects, the Republicans are not going to be that party.
Neither, of course, are the Democrats. After the Democratic National Committee stripped New Hampshire of what it believes is its God-given right to hold the first-in-the-nation primary, and after the New Hampshire Democrats decided to go ahead anyway, even though it had no bearing on delegate selection, Biden opted not to appear on the ballot. When a congressional nonentity named Dean Phillips nonetheless came forth to challenge for the Democratic nomination and placed himself on the ballot, Biden was compelled to have a shadow campaign wage a write-in effort for him. The president appears to have received close to 70 percent of the Democrats’ votes, all of them write-ins, while Phillips got under 20 percent in what was, understandably, a very low-turnout election.
Given the asymmetry between the two parties’ primaries—one for the money and one for the show—more Democrats may have been rooting for Haley last night than Biden. But Democrats’ good wishes can’t sustain Haley’s campaign. The next primary, in her home state of South Carolina, isn’t until February 24th, and between then and now, Trump will continue to collect the endorsements of Republicans who know better (like Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who took the leap last night) and those who probably don’t (like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who did so last week). As polls show Haley trailing Trump badly in her home state, all she can do if she stays on the stump is to serve as an ineffectual wrecking ball, clanging against the epistemologically closed wall of Trump supporters without making so much as a dent.
There never should have been a scintilla of doubt that Trump would win the Republican nomination and win it early. He has remade the party in his own image: vengeful, seeking scapegoats, seldom encountering and never analyzing well-documented facts, and ultimately incapable of generating real solutions to real problems. The absence of solutions narrows their options to the vilification of culprits, real and more likely imagined. And on that, Trump delivers.
