Goodbye Super Tuesday: Donald Trump to wrap up nomination

They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff. Hannibal Lecter? Anybody know Hannibal Lecter? We don’t want ’em in this country.

Donald Trump, talking to Right Side Broadcasting Network at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Monday evening, gets a laugh from the audience with this line, like an ageing insult comic giving the crowd a little call back to his most famous material, the outrage that kicked it all off. The former president — and, by the time you’re reading this, all-but-confirmed Republican presidential nominee — was in fine form, fresh from the Supreme Court ruling that states could not kick him off the ballot.

Indeed, everything old is new again. Trump is going out of his way to be vile, with the media calling his comments a “new low” and wondering whether his performance will affect his chances… even as it runs background from his people that he’s toning things down and getting more presidential.

So, to Super Tuesday, where Republicans in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and the US territory of American Samoa will vote for their candidate. Roughly a third of the delegates required to become the nominee are up for grabs here.

Trump won a crushing victory in North Dakota over the weekend, bringing his overall total to 273. Nikki Haley, the last, fading hope for the Never Trump movement, has just 43, 19 of which she picked up in Washington DC, her only primary win over Trump so far. She even lost in her home state of South Carolina.

Super Tuesday used to be an event, particularly for the party picking its challenger (Joe Biden, as with most incumbents, is sailing through the Democratic equivalent). But as the faintly deflated coverage makes clear, in 2024 it’s basically a procession.

Trump once famously remarked “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. Ever since then, it appears he’s been committed to all but testing that theory. The vile race-baiting, the chaos of his government (he managed to lose the 2020 election with a higher personal vote than 2016), and now, the many, many court cases and the alleged slide into what Gore Vidal called “the bright Autumn of senescence”.

This of course calls attention to the strange shift in the rules when it comes to coverage of Trump. President Joe Biden’s every hoary moment is accompanied by reams of humiliating coverage, while Trump mixing up Biden and Obama, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, the country Argentina with a person of the same name, doesn’t seem to give anyone pause, except a few publications hoarsely wondering how that could be. Here’s Trump’s plan for America’s missile defense system: “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… Boom. Okay. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom”

And on education: “We have children that are no longer going to school. They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues, there’s no more sports…”

There are two reasons for this disjuncture. One, though Democrats are unwilling to admit it, it that Trump’s grubby charisma projects a vigour that Biden hasn’t mustered for quite some time. Trump is now closer to the Diamond Joe character created by The Onion about Biden’s time as vice-president than Biden is.

The other is the big one: the chaos is all part of the appeal for Trump supporters — that he can ramble and rave and still be president is of a piece with the fact that he can savage high profile Republicans and still have the party almost completely behind him. For anyone voting Biden, the thought that he is not 100% present is a cause for genuine concern. For a rusted on Trump voter, it would be just another thing he’d been clever enough to get away with. For context, the media was making worried sounds about Trump slurring his words as far back 2017.

According to poll aggregator RacetotheWH, Trump has a clear lead over Biden, and has done since September last year.

Are we doomed to a repeat of Biden vs Trump? And is The Donald in with a real chance in November? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.