While the Republicans in South Carolina choose him as their candidate for the presidential election, Trump is full of hate. On the judiciary, on the Democrats, on migrants. He is also upset about Germany.
Hearting the US flag, relaxedly conjuring up the apocalypse in the USA, insulting his political opponents and finally shaking his hips a little: Donald Trump has almost perfected appearances for his audience after almost ten years in politics. This is also the case at the conservative CPAC conference, which is something like a global meeting of conservatives, market liberals and libertarians, and where everything that somehow smells of the state or social justice is criticized. “I was supposed to be somewhere else, but I said I had to go to CPAC,” joked Trump, the star guest there, on Saturday afternoon.
Elsewhere is South Carolina, where the Republican primaries are also taking place. While Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining competitor for the presidential nomination, and her campaign team sent out invitations to the event in the city of Charleston in order to experience the fourth together after three defeats, Trump’s camp insulted Haley in its messages and sent one out Calling on party leadership to declare the primary election decided: “Delaying this will help (US President) Joe Biden destroy our country.”
In fact, the primary election will most likely be decided after this Saturday in South Carolina. In addition to Haley, another medium-sized political miracle occurs. Trump received more than 60 percent of the vote, Haley just under 40 percent. It wouldn’t be so painful for the 52-year-old if she hadn’t come from South Carolina and been elected governor there twice. However, your own state prefers Trump – a stronger sign that Republican voters have chosen their favorite in the duel.
Riddled with disgust
While the Republicans in South Carolina are still going to the polls, Trump greets Argentina’s President Javier Milei from his stage. The libertarian will then give a pretty tough lecture about how great the free market is and how any government intervention is bad for the economy. After many names and niceties, Trump returns to his teleprompter – and gives a tough speech, riddled with disgust for those who think differently, that puts his previous rhetoric to shame.
The refugees on the southern border are the fixed point to which he returns again and again during the almost hour and a half. Immigrants and the border are the most important election issue for the Conservatives. “Unscrupulous gangs will invade our country,” the police will hunt down conservatives and religious people, Hamas and Antifa will put people in fear and terror, Trump says. There will be a new category of crime: “migrant crime,” which will be much more brutal than current violent crime; They would already be overrunning all of New York City; nowhere is safe anymore because of them. This is nonsense, but he says it anyway.
Close the border and deport everyone – that’s how rigorously Trump imagines his possible second presidency.
(Photo: AP)
Today, he is taking everything that Trump has always been accused of to the extreme. The ex-president goes on a wild, xenophobic ride through incomplete, false connotations that have a goal he does not name: maximum fear. Of course, only he can free the USA from this fear: as president, his first official act will be to close the border, promote fossil fuels again and send 18 million people home without residence permits, he announced . The audience cheers. Otherwise, “hordes of illegals” would stream across the borders, “40 to 50 million people,” the social system and public education would collapse.
Trump sees himself as a “political dissident”
If Joe Biden wins the election, the same thing will happen to the industry because of Biden’s “green fraud,” with “constant power outages and rampant inflation.” Then China would “dominate” the USA. He, on the other hand, “got 400 billion dollars from China” – he probably means the income from the punitive tariffs in the trade war – “and then the virus came from China…” That sounds like a bizarre accusation towards Beijing. But it gets even wilder: Because of Biden’s foreign policy, “we will lose World War III” because of still unknown weapons, Trump predicts. He doesn’t give any details, but he is convinced that neither the attack on Israel nor the Ukraine war would have happened with him in the White House. After all, he knows Russian President Vladimir Putin well.
In this context he comes to talk about Germany. He was against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, but Biden would have approved it immediately instead. “We defend Germany, and then they pay billions of dollars to the people we defend them against? How logical is that?” he fumes: “And then they say I’m too friendly to Russia.” Instead, he is a “political dissident” and has been indicted more often than Al Capone, he says proudly, calling the Democrats and practically the entire judiciary a “rabid mob of left-wing radical partisans,” “tyrants,” “bandits,” and “fascists.” “, “Rogue”. They are executioners disguised as judges and prosecutors.
Don’t want to give up: Nikki Haley.
(Photo: REUTERS)
After half an hour dripping with hate, Trump wanders off the teleprompter. The ex-president falls into his typical conversational tone, plays with the audience’s reactions, and is happy about it; like he always does when he feels good. He tells a detailed story about when he flew to Iraq when he was president and was sweating from nervousness when he landed in the dark night. And how he then plotted with local generals how they could defeat the Islamic State. Trump appears approachable when he talks about phone calls with his wife and how she sometimes makes him stand up when he asks for her compliments after appearances.
“Joe, you’re fired!”
He doesn’t mention his competitor Nikki Haley once. Instead, Trump is already in campaign mode for November. To cheers, he announces that moving back into the White House will be a “victory of revenge” for him and “Doomsday” for the others. “Joe, you’re fired!” he says.
A few hours later, he repeated the sentence during his victory speech in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia. It was already after 7 p.m. and the US news agency Associated Press announced the success of the big favorite as the clock struck and the polling stations closed.
However, there will only be certainty about the conservative candidacy after March 5th, when the Republicans will also have the vote in 15 other states. Because Haley herself, she said that that evening, wouldn’t even think about giving up before then. Everything else would be like it used to be in the Soviet Union.