Over there at Newsmax (where, full disclosure, I am a contributor) is this interesting — and telling — headline coming out of New Hampshire. It reads:
Trump Sets Record for Most Votes in N.H. Primary
The story reports that Trump’s Tuesday victory “set a record for most votes received in the state’s presidential primary.”
Trump’s total was 163,713 votes. The previous record-holder was on the Democrat side, with Vermont’s favorite socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, getting 152,000 in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton.
The rest of the field on this score on the GOP side is as follows, going all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower’s two runs in 1952 and 1956:
2016: Donald Trump: 100,406
2012: Mitt Romney: 95,669
2008: John McCain: 88,713
2004: George Bush: 53,962
2000: John McCain: 115,490
1996: Pat Buchanan: 56,874
1992: George H. W. Bush: 92,271
1988: George H. W. Bush: 59,290
1984: Ronald Reagan: 65,033
1980: Ronald Reagan: 72,886
1976: Gerald Ford: 55,156
1972: Richard Nixon: 79,239
1968: Richard Nixon: 80,666
1964: Henry Cabot Lodge: 33,007
1960: Ricard Nixon: 65,204
1956 Dwight Eisenhower: 56,464
1952 Dwight Eisenhower: 46,661
All of which is to say, there’s a message in this particular Trump victory. That being that the Trump popularity on visible display at all those rallies, not to mention at election day voting sites in both New Hampshire and Iowa before that, mean something.
That “something” is that the enthusiasm for his remaining opponent, ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — and before that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — simply isn’t there. Haley can stay in the race as long as she wants and is able, but winning is clearly not going to be coming in her direction.
The question at this point is: why? Why has Haley, and DeSantis and others before her, failed utterly to overtake the former president?
The answer, it would seem to be clear, is that Haley and the others are simply — merely — candidates. Former President Trump, it should be clear by now to all, is not just a candidate. Trump is a movement.
Only a serious, energized political movement could produce Trump’s New Hampshire numbers or his blowout, 30-point victory over DeSantis in Iowa.
When Trump came down that Trump Tower escalator in 2015, few if any could see that the New York celebrity billionaire builder was going to lead a decidedly serious movement that would upend the way the American political Swamp did business.
Clearly — and she is not alone — Nikki Haley still doesn’t get it. Here is this typical Haley approach to Trump, as reported by the Associated Press:
BLUFFTON, S.C. (AP) — Nikki Haley argued Monday former President Donald Trump causes too much chaos to be successful in a second White House term, reiterating her argument about the GOP front-runner at a large town hall in her home state of South Carolina.
Got that? Cleaning the Washington Swamp and its good ole boy and girl way of doing business is just too important to be disrupted and cleaned up. And any attempt to clean it up is guilty of bringing “chaos.”
In short, Haley is making it plain that, if elected, she intends to be one more Swamp creature, going along to get along to just be a good ole girl in the Club that is the Washington Swamp. No draining the Swamp for her, because that brings chaos.
Back there in the Reagan era, the president nominated Judge Robert Bork for a Supreme Court seat. Bork was a decided conservative, seriously well qualified for the job. He was, to say the least, not a fan — much less a member of — the Swamp. And within hours of his nomination, all hell broke loose as the Washington Swamp turned on him in a blink. Why? Because Bork had a long record of taking on the Swamp Establishment.
In his book The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law, written after the uproar surrounding the defeat of his nomination, Bork wrote this:
The public campaign (to defeat his nomination), designed to influence senators through public opinion polls, consisted of systematic distortion of my academic writings and my judicial record and, it must be said, employed racial and gender politics of a most pernicious variety. The ferocity of the attack, the ideological stance of the assailants, and the tactics they used all showed that the opposition knew they were fighting over more than one judge. They were fighting for control of the legal culture….
My nomination was…merely one battleground in a long-running war for control of our legal culture, which, in turn, was part of a larger war for control of our general culture.
Bingo.
And all these years later, that war has only gotten worse. (Ask Justice Brett Kavanaugh.)
Which is exactly why the war on Donald Trump — in the legal and media establishments to name but two — is so intense. And as was true with Bork, anyone who is capable of taking on the Swamp will be targeted.
Thus it is that Trump’s determined focus on draining the Swamp results in what Swamp dwellers see, as Nikki Haley calls it — “chaos” — refusing to do business as usual in the Swamp.
The thinking here is that Trump’s decidedly evident movement is not going to let Haley win. They will turn out en masse to elect their champion.
And, as seen in the Iowa and now New Hampshire results, they mean business.
READ MORE:
The Other New Hampshire Primary: No Debates, No Drama, No Biden
