Donald Trump consolidated his dominance in Nevada with a resounding victory in Thursday night’s caucuses after a symbolic victory in Tuesday’s primary.
The race was called for Trump with less than 1 percent of the vote reported at 8:05 p.m. PST, just 35 minutes after the caucus sites closed.
Trump was ahead with more than 97 percent of the vote.
The former president was delighted as he headed to Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon, immediately following Supreme Court oral arguments, where both conservative and liberal justices expressed skepticism about state efforts to keep the former president off the 2024 ballot. .
He spent the entire day in front of the Nevada caucuses reacting to those oral arguments, as well as a blockbuster Justice Department report that essentially deemed President Joe Biden too weak to charge with a crime in the classified documents case.
Donald Trump posted an image of his private plane as it took off for the Nevada caucuses on Thursday after holding a press conference at Mar-a-Lago about the Justice Department’s report on President Joe Biden’s declining memory.
Nevada voters line up at a high school in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the caucus on Thursday.
Trump went straight to Treasure Island Casino & Resort for his late-night caucus party after landing in Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, his remaining competitor, former UN ambassador. Nikki Haley, was not on the caucus ballot. She refused to spend the $55,000 needed to participate in the caucus and repeatedly claimed that the primary race was “rigged” by MAGA-aligned Nevada Republicans to give him the victory and the delegates.
Ryan Binkley, a Republican candidate for the 2024 election and a businessman and pastor based in Texas, was a competitor in the caucus. He only had 9 votes at the time the race was called.
As Trump prepared to deliver his victory remarks, his Nevada-based representatives and allies flocked to a ballroom on Treasure Island.
The Justice Department revealed in Thursday’s report that it would not bring charges against Biden because he would likely appear to a jury “as a sympathetic, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory.”
This renewed calls from Haley demanding that the president undergo a mental competency test to prove he is fit to continue serving as CEO.
The Justice Department noted in its report that Biden forgot on different occasions throughout the interview the years in which his term as vice president began and ended, and did not remember what year his son Beau died.
‘Biden took the Papers into his ‘mental prime time.’ He should not be allowed to get away with this and was not protected by the Presidential Records Act,’ Trump lamented in a Truth Social article on Thursday. ‘I cooperated with investigators. Corrupt Joe Biden did not; Quite the opposite, following the usual and corrupt Democratic manual. He “intentionally withheld” documents. This is fraudulent justice.’
Several hours before Nevada gave its results, Trump also scored a victory in the third primary race of the cycle in the Virginia Islands caucuses, United States.
He won 73.9 percent of the vote, compared to Haley’s 26 percent, and is expected to take all the islands’ available delegates.
‘Great news!’ Trump wrote in Truth Social on Thursday. “As we land in Nevada, preparing to go to the Caucus, the news just came in that we overwhelmingly won the Virgin Islands Caucus, ALL the delegates, with almost 75% of the vote.”
‘This has been a great day for your favorite president, the Republican Party and democracy!’ he pointed out, likely references not only his victory, but also the Justice Department report and SCOTUS arguments.
Trump’s Las Vegas-based senior adviser Kash Patel told DailyMail.com on Wednesday that winning Nevada is the “key to the West,” while drawing parallels between demographics and voter priorities in the state. of Silver and in Arizona: a must-win in 2024.
Nevada turned blue in 2016 and 2020, but Arizona was a red state that turned blue in 2020, and which Trump and Biden see as a priority to reach the White House in 2024.
Nevada voters wait in line to enter a caucus site at Spanish Springs Elementary School in Sparks, Nevada, on Thursday, Feb. 8, following Tuesday’s primary election where Nikki Haley lost to “none of these candidates.”
Trump held his late-night caucus party at the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, seen at its peak as the former president’s famous gold Trump Tower hotel looms over the Las Vegas Strip.
While Tuesday’s primary election was only symbolic after the Nevada Republican Party decided that all delegates would be awarded at Thursday’s caucuses, Trump was still the biggest winner that night.
Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley came in second in the primary behind the “none of these candidates” option, which offered voters the opportunity to vote for no one, an effort spearheaded by Trump’s senior adviser , Kash Patel.
Haley’s surprising defeat demonstrates that Trump supporters are so fired up and mobilized that they were willing to show up twice to vote symbolically and then vote for the former president.
“We stood in line at the South Reno Caucus to vote for President Trump,” former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, along with a video of a massive line of people waiting to enter the site. of the caucus.
“There’s snow on the ground, it’s a cold night and people walked miles to stand in line for an hour or more,” he said. ‘Trump is the only person they can vote for, but they want to make his voice heard. Great sign!’
Trump only participated in the caucuses after the Republican Party said that any candidate who registered for the primary was excluded from the race two days later.