New Hampshire vote boosts Trump, and maybe Biden

Before Trump won yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, Nikki Haley released a statement saying her White House bid would continue whatever the result, and asking – in full caps – DO REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN?

So what? They do, but they want Trump more. With most votes counted he was beating Haley by a solid if not spectacular 11 points. That leaves his progress to the Republican nomination all but assured. It also

• makes a Republican victory in November’s general election less likely, not more;
• forces his party to confront the reality that a candidate facing 91 charges in four criminal cases is a liability as well as a martyr; and
• forces the rest of the world to confront the reality that even though Haley is more likely to defeat Joe Biden, Trump can too – and if he does his assault on international norms and niceties will be much more organised than the first time around. 

Haley says she plans to fight on. Good luck with that. She did clear a notional 40 per cent threshold in New Hampshire, winning the support of 60 per cent of self-declared independents. She does have money, and plans to spend $4 million at once on TV ads in South Carolina. 

But that is her home state and Trump is 37 points ahead of her in polls even there. His control of the Republican party has been tested and found strong. Only an outbreak of rational moderation of the kind Republicans have shunned since 2016 could break it. 

The rematch is on, and it will be…

Unpopular. Three quarters of Americans don’t want to have to choose between Trump and Biden again. “The worst-kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump,” Haley claimed last night. An even-worse-kept secret is how worried the Democrats are about their own candidate. Both will need high turnout in November. Neither is inspiring it so far. Barely 15 per cent of Iowa’s registered Republicans voted in their caucuses and the Pew Research Center says floating voters are tuning out the whole election.

Unprecedented. Trump would be the first ex-president to run again having been indicted in a criminal case. Others have run with chequered pasts but not as former presidents. None comes close to the dozens of charges of fraud and election interference that Trump rejects as a witch-hunt.  

Unpredictable. Trump leads Biden in most head-to-head polls but

• the race would be too close to call even if it were held tomorrow, and it’s ten months out;
• unlikely as it sounds (and is), Biden could still withdraw to give way to a younger candidate chosen at a brokered convention;
• Trump could be convicted in at least one of his four cases. “Only” half of those who voted for him yesterday said they would do so if he were a felon.

The rest of the world is already making contingency plans for a second Trump presidency, which experience suggests would be more than mildly disruptive on at least three fronts:

Trade. Trade hawks working on a Trump 2.0 platform propose an across-the-board 10 per cent tariff on US imports and a suspension of normal trade relations with China. The former could yield $2.5 trillion to the US Treasury but would act as a regressive tax on US workers, especially those in manufacturing sectors with long supply chains. The latter would boost India as an export powerhouse but end the Sino-American mutual dependence that has sustained global prosperity for the last three decades.

Security. Trump has said he’d end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. In practice this would likely entail suspending military aid to Ukraine and pressuring Kyiv to agree a deal acceptable to Russia. He would also

• double down on unconditional US support for Israel in Gaza and elsewhere;
• keep the US out of European-led efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons programme; and
• stop spending “trillions and trillions of dollars on endless wars all over the place in countries you’ve never heard of”, as he said on Monday in remarks that won’t inspire faith in US security guarantees for Nato allies or Taiwan on his watch.

Democracy. Campaigning in New Hampshire, Trump called Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Kim Jong-un of North Korea “fine people”, and said it was “nice to have a strong man running your country”. His base seems to agree. His jovial warning that he’d be “dictator for a day” if re-elected was merely trolling the left, one of his former chiefs of staff told the BBC today. 

Miles to go:

And yet. A number: 0 – Republican candidates who have won Iowa and New Hampshire and not secured the presidential nomination.