Florida Man Facing 91 Criminal Counts Dominates Super Tuesday Primaries

Fresh off his Supreme Court victory, Donald Trump was crushing Nikki Haley across the country.

A photo collage of Donald Trump's mugshot and cut up pieces of a US map and a voting ballot.

Mother Jones illustration; Fulton County Sheriff's Office

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Donald Trump is coasting to victory in Super Tuesday primaries across the country—a decisive, if not unexpected, showing that follows his overwhelming wins in GOP nominating contests in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan earlier this year. 

The former president—who tried to overturn the 2020 election and illegally hold on to power—is facing four indictments covering a whopping 91 criminal counts, and he owes half a billion dollars following multiple civil judgements handed down this year alone. But on Monday, the US Supreme Court gave him a key legal victory, ruling that he could remain on state presidential ballots despite his involvement in inciting the January 6 insurrection. And on Tuesday, he was once again dominating the GOP primaries, leading former UN ambassador Nikki Haley in nine of the 10 states reporting results as of 8:45 pm ET—in most cases by huge margins. (Haley held a narrow lead in deep-blue Vermont.) Prior to Tuesday, Trump has won every GOP contest with the exception of Washington, DC, where Haley received the support of roughly two-thirds of the 2,000 voters who participated. 

Tuesday night’s results reaffirm what poll after poll had already shown: Trump wields a seemingly ironclad grip on the party, even as his first criminal trial is slated to begin later this month.

Haley has, up until now, nonetheless stubbornly refused to drop out, claiming that she has “no fear of Trump’s retribution.” But it remains to be seen if or how her crushing losses in Tuesday’s primaries will affect her campaign; she told reporters last week she was only “thinking about Super Tuesday.”

Tuesday’s results, if they hold throughout the evening, will all but guarantee that Trump will be the GOP nominee—though he won’t formally receive the party’s nomination until the national convention in July. Regardless, polls suggest it’s (basically) official: November’s election will present voters with a 2020 rematch—between Biden and Trump, and between democracy and authoritarianism.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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