Trump: the vulnerable juggernaut
He'll almost certainly win the nomination, but that doesn't mean every Republican will vote for him.
Last night Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley by 20 points, in the presidential primary held in Nikki Haley's home state, where she had been a relatively popular two-term Governor who held many more events in the state than Trump and outspent him by several orders of magnitude.
I thought I was pretty much alone in feeling that Haley’s result was honestly pretty good, all thing considered. But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell argued that Trump’s South Carolina result was low-key disastrous, and now I’m kind of freaking out because I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Lawrence O’Donnell about anything until now.
All three major cable news networks projected Donald Trump as the winner in South Carolina’s GOP primary over Nikki Haley just seconds after polls closed on Saturday, but MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell dismissed the numbers as “disastrous” for the former president.
O’Donnell argued Trump should not be happy with the results in South Carolina while approximately a quarter of the primary votes had been counted, with the former president pulling about 57% to Haley’s 42% at the time.
“These numbers are disastrous for Donald Trump. Disastrous,” O’Donnell said.
He noted that President Joe Biden won 96% of the vote in his South Carolina primary, though those numbers were not entirely shocking since Biden is a sitting president with the full backing of the DNC against longshot challengers like Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN).
“These numbers are disastrous for Donald Trump. Disastrous. It’s the reason I mentioned the big forgotten number of South Carolina, which is Joe Biden getting 96%, okay? That’s what you’re supposed to get, alright, and Donald Trump’s not going to come close to that,” O’Donnell said.
He predicted Haley would pull around a third of the support in the primary and argued only a “sliver” of those Haley voters in each state needs to simply not vote for Trump in the general election, and it would majorly benefit Biden.
If the Republican party was still something resembling a normal political party, I would have called the result a complete disaster for Haley.
But when you're talking about a cult marked by overwhelming loyalty toward its vindictive leader and his crazed followers, winning around 40% of the vote is honestly kind of impressive.
I don’t think of this as a candidate winning 60% of his party’s vote. I think of this as something like 40% of Scientologists voting against L. Ron Hubbard.
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