Trump Effectively Clinches Nomination, Potentially Giving GOP A Convicted Felon Atop Its 2024 Ticket

Donald Trump has effectively clinched the GOP nomination for president for the third straight cycle, meaning Republicans could well have a convicted felon at the top of their ticket heading into the November election.

Late Tuesday, Trump had won 11 contests of the 16 taking place across the country to Haley’s one, in Vermont.

Though Trump still needs to win 1,215 delegates to become the presumptive nominee, that task now appears to be little more than a formality and will likely take place either next week or the week after.

Trump, while claiming at the start of his 18 minutes of remarks from his South Florida country club home that his Super Tuesday wins were unprecedented, proceeded to give a rambling, low-energy speech that hit his favorite lies about immigration, the size of his tax cuts, China paying billions in tariffs ― but almost nothing about the state of the Republican primaries.

“We want to have unity, and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly,” apparently alluding to when he would wrap up the nomination.

The coup-attempting former president has been the favorite to win again for almost the entire period since the 2022 midterms, as Republican primary voters largely bought into his lies about the 2020 election having been “stolen” from him.

Almost all of his rivals for the 2024 slot refused to challenge him on that point, and in doing so boxed themselves into defending him after state and federal prosecutors indicted him for his efforts to remain in power despite having lost reelection ― efforts that culminating in the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the first television debate of the primary season, with Trump refusing to participate and not be on stage, six of the eight candidates raised their hands when asked if they would still support Trump as the nominee even if he had been convicted of a felony.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who actually led Trump in some national and early state polls in late 2022 and early 2023, even vowed not to help the New York state prosecutor extradite Trump from Florida to face charges there.

DeSantis then attributed Trump’s ever-increasing popularity among Republican primary voters to his four criminal indictments, and went so far as to suggest that the prosecutions were all part of a Democratic plot to help Trump win the nomination because they knew he would be the easiest to beat come November.

Trump’s first trial is scheduled to start in late March on that New York case, which accuses him of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star just ahead of the 2016 election.

But his next likely trial is his most consequential: a federal prosecution charging him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and illegally remaining in power. If convicted, he could be sentenced to decades in prison.

Trump also faces a Georgia state prosecution for trying to overturn his election loss in that state as well as a second federal indictment for refusing to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House.