Donald Trump may have secured the Republican presidential nomination, but Nikki Haley—who dropped out of the race two weeks ago—is still proving to be a thorn in his side.
Trump easily won the five Republican primaries held Tuesday night in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and Kansas. But he failed to garner anything close to unanimous party support.
Instead, Haley managed to rack up more than 500,000 votes. And that’s in addition to the nearly three million votes she won while she was still running, including sweeping the primaries in Vermont and Washington, D.C., both Democratic strongholds.
It’s likely that some of the votes Haley received Tuesday were cast early, before she dropped out of the race. But the fact that she continues to nip at Trump’s heels is a sign that he is struggling to unite his voter base.
Although Haley embraced political stances that, in many cases, were just as extreme as Trump’s, she appealed to more moderate Republicans and Never Trump voters. Some Haley voters are bound to vote for Trump, but those who are more centrist or independent aren’t guaranteed to jump to his support.
“The Haley voters are the swing voters of the 2024 election,” Marc Thiessen, the chief speech writer for former President George W. Bush, told Fox News last week. “Trump has to win them over, he has to pivot now to the general election and focus on uniting the party and the non-MAGA part of the GOP.”
“What Trump needs to understand is that MAGA voters are not going to decide this election.”
When Haley dropped out, she did not endorse Trump in her resignation speech. Instead, she urged the former president to “earn the votes” of all Republican and independent voters.
Trump, however, has made a hard pivot to the right. He has somehow become even more extreme than during his first term, garnering comparisons to Adolf Hitler and other authoritarian leaders. And while that has certainly played well with his most loyal supporters, it would seem he is failing to successfully court anyone else.
Donald Trump brazenly included more falsehoods about the 2020 election in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Tuesday for his immunity case.
Trump was supposed to go on trial in March for trying to overthrow the previous presidential election, but he and his lawyers have delayed proceedings by arguing that the former president has legal immunity against prosecution. The Supreme Court further held things up when it agreed to weigh in on the matter. The high court will hear arguments on April 25.
In a brief filed Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers made their case as to why he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while still in office. Most of the arguments aren’t new, but one part of the filing stands out: In a list of the charges against Trump, the filing alleges that Trump was simply communicating with “the Vice President, the Vice President’s official staff, and members of Congress to urge them to exercise their official duties in the election certification process in accordance with the position, based on voluminous information available to President Trump in his official capacity, that the election was tainted by extensive fraud and irregularities.”
The indictment also rewords special counsel Jack Smith’s other charges against Trump, claiming the former president is being indicted for having “communicated with state officials about the administration of the federal election and urged them to exercise their official responsibilities in accordance with the conclusion that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud and irregularities.”
Absolutely no evidence of fraud has been found regarding the 2020 election. Even investigators that Trump himself hired have been unable to find a shred of proof to back up his claims that the vote was rigged against him.
More importantly, the indictment does not say that Trump was acting based on information that the election was fraudulent. The indictment alleges that Trump knew he had lost but still insisted that fraudulent ballots had been cast and that electronic voting machines were switching votes to Democratic.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment said. “In fact, the Defendant was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue—often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts—and he deliberately disregarded the truth.”
People including then–Vice President Mike Pence and senior Justice Department officials, whom Trump had appointed, repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud, according to the indictment. So did the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, senior White House attorneys, and state-level allies.
In fact, a top adviser warned about the efforts to overturn the election quite clearly: “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership,” an unnamed senior campaign adviser wrote in an email on December 8, 2020, referring to Trump’s “Elite Strike Task Force” led by Rudy Giuliani.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed the country’s toughest immigration law—Texas Senate Bill 4—to go into effect. But not every member of the nation’s highest court agreed with the decision.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the court was inviting “further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.”
“The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional,” she wrote.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan also dissented from the opinion.
In practice, the law will allow state police to arrest anyone they suspect to be an undocumented immigrant, and charge them with misdemeanors or felonies in the event of repeat offenses. It will also allow them to deport undocumented........