Former President Donald Trump hailed his near Super Tuesday sweep – as the returns were still coming in – Tuesday night in a raucous campaign celebration at Mar-a-Lago.
"They call it Super Tuesday for a reason; this is a big one," Trump said, taking the podium around 10:16 p.m. ET in a speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the Newsmax2 streaming platform.
"This was an amazing night and an amazing day."
Trump won California, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts – with Vermont going narrowly to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Results in Utah's caucuses and Alaska were still to come later in the night on the West Coast.
Before California's polls closed at 11 p.m. ET, Trump made an urgent call for unity, both among the Republican Party and the nation in his campaign watch party speech at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
"Success will bring unity to our country," Trump told his crowd, thanking his family and campaign staff for standing behind him and pushing him forward.
"I read an article yesterday where it said this is one of the finest run campaigns that anybody has ever seen," Trump said. "That's pretty good, right? That's pretty good.
"And we have no choice because Nov. 5 is right around the corner. Nov. 5 is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country."
Trump hailed his keeping America and the world out of wars, hitting President Joe Biden as the "worst president in the history of our country," and rebuking his critics attacking his personality as threatening.
"'He's going to cause wars': I said, 'No, my personality is going to keep us out of wars,' and that's what happened," Trump said, not mentioning his lone remaining GOP primary rival by name even once.
The idle Haley's only victory came in Vermont, but the former president carried other states that might have been favorable to Haley such as Virginia and Maine, which have large swaths of moderate voters like those who have backed her in previous primaries.
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump to formally become the presumptive nominees but Trump continued to dominate every state thus far.
Haley, who has argued both Biden and Trump are too old to return to the White House, was spending election night watching results in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, where she lives. Her campaign website does not list any upcoming events. Still, her aides insisted the mood at her watch party was "jubilant."
Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, meanwhile, was packed for a victory party that featured hors d'oeuvres including empanadas and baked brie. Among those attending were staff and supporters, including the rapper Forgiato Blow and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C. The crowd erupted as screens around the ballroom announced Trump had won North Carolina.
The former president has nonetheless already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now faces only Haley, his former U.N. ambassador. She has maintained strong fundraising and notched her first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans. Trump mocked Haley as being "crowned queen of the swamp."
"We're going to win this election because we have no choice," Trump said in his muted victory speech that lasted only around 20 minutes – brief by his standards. "If we lose the election, we're not going to have a country. And we're going to do something."
The speech showed a different showman of Trump, according to former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., on Newsmax.
"His tone tonight was just very serious – all business," Santorum said. "This was no fluff. He made a couple of cracks about Joe Biden, which is great, kind of funny. That's all within bounds.
"I thought he – in tone – did more to reach out to voters tonight than I've seen in a long time."
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