DONALD TRUMP’S PATH to the Republican presidential nomination has never looked clearer. 

Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining opponent, suffered a humiliating defeat in the Nevada Republican primary on Tuesday night. Even though Trump’s name was not on the ballot, Haley ended up with just 32% of the vote, while the option labelled “None of these candidates” received 61%.

Haley, a former governor of South Carolina who served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has managed to outlast her other Republican rivals in the race, including Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Chris Christie and Tim Scott. However, after finishing in third place following a landslide Trump win in Iowa and a second place finish in New Hampshire, it appears that Haley has failed to reclaim the heart of party from Trumpism and the MAGA movement – even with all the other “moderates” out of the way.

In one way, this defeat for Haley is symbolic. Nevada does not assign its delegates through its primary but instead through its caucus, which will take place on Wednesday. Trump is expected to sweep the state’s delegates, buoyed in no short order by Haley’s crushing defeat last night. Symbolic though it may be, it appears to send Haley a clear message: “Not you”.

This latest defeat comes amid last gasp attempts by Haley to drum up some momentum. Last weekend, the 52-year-old appeared on Saturday Night Live in a sketch that poked fun at her gaffe earlier in the campaign in which she failed to identify slavery as a root cause of the American Civil War. The appearance apparently did little to enthuse conservative voters.

The next primary takes place on 24 February in Haley’s home state of South Carolina. Haley, however, is not enjoying any home-field advantage, as Trump leads her 58% to 32% among potential GOP primary voters according to a poll published this week by the Washington Post. Should Haley suffer another emphatic lost to Trump in territory that should be favourable to her, it seems unlikely that her campaign would continue any further.

Employing the kind of logic that governed politics prior to Trump’s unprecedented ascendancy, one would think that Trump is facing even more obstacles this time around than he did in 2016 and 2020.

On 26 January, a New York City court ordered Donald Trump to pay $83.3 million to journalist E Jean Carroll for defaming the writer after she made claims that he had sexually assaulted her in 1996. A federal appeals court yesterday rejected Trump’s legal argument that he is immune from prosecution in relation to any charges that many stem from various investigations into attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Trump is also fighting a civil suit in New York, where he is accused of fraud, and is federally charged by the US Department of Justice with illegally removing classified documents from the White House. 

Nevertheless, analysts who suspected that either Haley, or DeSantis before her, would mount a credible campaign against Donald Trump have found their predictions fallen well wide of the mark. He is winning the nomination at a cantor. 

Indeed, it is notable that Trump faced sterner opposition from his primary rivals in 2016 – a lot that included Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. All men are regularly the source of mockery for their failure to match Trump as he secured the nomination. 

This is of course in large part due to the treatment they received from Trump as he bullied his way to the top of the polls eight years ago. This time around Trump has skipped the primary debates, meaning that Haley and DeSantis never even came face to face with the former president’s idiosyncratic and undeniably effective discursive style.

Nevertheless, Trump’s 2016 opponents fared far better against the New Yorker than the current crop. Ted Cruz, for example, defeated  Trump in the Iowa caucus, as well as in several other states including Texas, Wyoming, Maine and Kansas. Rubio, on the other hand, won a commanding victory in the swing state of Minnesota. If anything, the fact Haley and DeSantis have underperformed their 2016 counterparts has vindicated Trump’s decision to avoid sharing a stage with them. 

Haley has suffered personal insults from Trump, who has called her “birdbrain” on his Truth Social social media platform. Trump has also appeared to make an issue of Haley’s Indian origin, misspelling her birth name Nimarata as “Nimbra” and “Nimrada”.

As the world has come to expect, these tasteless remarks have done nothing to dampen Trump’s base. Donald Trump is likely now a matter of weeks away from formalising his presumptive role as Joe Biden’s Republican challenger for the Oval Office this November, setting up a repeat of the 2020 election.