The Donald has cleared the first few hurdles, but can he really win again? Emily Hohler reports
Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s “once and future king”, says Lloyd Green in The Guardian. He may have failed to knock rival Nikki Haley out of the contest for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday with his win in the New Hampshire primary, but he is “the first non-incumbent Republican to win both Iowa and New Hampshire” and is far ahead of Haley in the polls for South Carolina’s contest next month. His momentum is potentially “unstoppable”, agree Lauren Fedor and James Politi in the Financial Times, putting him on course for a “rematch” with Democratic incumbent Joe Biden in the November election.
Awestruck coverage
If Haley cannot win in New Hampshire, where her typical supporter is “heavily overrepresented” and she splashed double Trump’s $15.7m, she “cannot expect to win anywhere”, says The Economist. Trump, for his part, just wants to “wrap up the nomination race” so he can turn his attention to Joe Biden in a rerun of the acrimonious 2020 contest that many Americans “dread”, says Alex Leary in The Wall Street Journal.
If this happens, the race would feature the “unprecedented dynamic of Trump splitting time between the campaign and the courtroom”. His first federal criminal trial is due to start on 4 March, the day before “Super Tuesday”, when the greatest number of US states hold primaries and caucuses.
If he wins a second term, his “chaotic style and unstable personality make predictions difficult”, but expect “tariffs, the possible abandonment of Ukraine and Taiwan, a transactional approach to other allies, aggressive bartering with enemies and a further decay of global rules”, says The Economist.
The media’s “awestruck coverage” risks creating a “false impression” that a Trump win is all but assured, says Robert Reich in The Guardian. Yet just 56,260 of 2,083,979 registered voters in Iowa voted for him last week. Not exactly a “stunning show of strength”. No one should confuse his performance in the primaries with success in the presidential election. Former presidents have a “huge advantage in their party’s primaries
