Donald Trump throws a fit after losing Washington DC Republican primary

| 12:14 am EST March 4, 2024
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Based on past voting history, we all knew Donald Trump would lose the 2024 Washington DC Republican primary. He’s extraordinarily unpopular there, even among Republicans. But it turns out he lost to Nikki Haley by a whopping thirty points. Naturally, Trump is throwing a fit and insisting that he wasn’t trying to win there anyway.

Trump posted an angry screed to his social network, insisting that “I purposely stayed away from the D.C. Vote because it is the “Swamp,” with very few delegates, and no upside.” He then went on to attack Haley with personal insults, while bragging about his wins elsewhere.

The question is whether this loss means anything. On the one hand, it’s not a sign that Haley is going to catch up to Trump in the delegate count. That’s not happening. Trump keeps underperforming, but he has a sizable enough lead in Super Tuesday polling that he will likely win most of the states that vote that day.

But on the other hand, the entire media is now referring to Donald Trump as the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, and yet two-thirds of Republicans just voted against him in a primary race. That shouldn’t be happening. Even though it’s “just” Washington DC, it’s still almost stunning to see a presumptive nominee get blown out so badly. It’s the latest sign that the Republican voters who hate Trump are not coming around, even if they do think he’ll be the nominee.

Imagine if President Biden were to lose a Democratic primary state by forty points, or by any margin for that matter. We’d be seeing headlines about how deeply unpopular he is and how much trouble he’s going to face in the general election. Actually we’re seeing Biden winning Democratic primary states by sixty or eighty points, and the headlines still ludicrously claim that it means he’s in trouble.

So yeah, there should be serious attention paid to Donald Trump’s blowout loss in the Washington DC Republican primary. Again, it doesn’t mean he’s going to lose the delegate race. He’ll win that by a sizable margin. But if he keeps underperforming like this, it’ll be yet another reason for the delegates to question whether to let him have the nomination at the Republican National Convention – along with his upcoming criminal conviction and his worsening dementia.