Former President Trump is officially the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Trump clinched his party’s 2024 nomination Tuesday when Georgia, Mississippi and Washington state held primaries.
He called it a ‘really great day of victory’ in a video message to supporters.
With no major challengers left, both Trump and President Biden, who locked up his party’s nomination earlier in the evening, were on course to collect all or nearly all the delegates up for grabs in Tuesday’s contests, putting each of them over the top and making them the Democratic and Republican presumptive presidential nominees.
Trump and his successor in the White House will formally become the two major party nominees this summer, as the Republicans and Democrats host their national nominating conventions in July and August, respectively.
Trump had 1,078 delegates at the start of the day. He needed 1,215 to lock up the nomination.
Fifty-nine GOP delegates were up for grabs in Georgia, with 40 at stake in Mississippi and 43 in Washington state. Nineteen more delegates are up for grabs in Hawaii, which held a Republican presidential caucus later in the evening.
Trump swept 14 of the 15 GOP Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses last week, which moved him closer to officially locking up the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. And Trump’s last rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race the day after Super Tuesday.
The November rematch between Biden and Trump is the first in the race for the White House since 1956, when Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated former Democratic Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois when they faced off a second time.
Trump, a businessman, real estate mogul and reality TV star, won the White House in 2016 by upsetting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But he was defeated by Biden four years later when he ran for re-election.
Trump launched his third White House bid in November 2022. Trump last year made history as the first president or former president to face criminal charges.
The former president faces four major criminal trials and a total of 91 indictments, as well as a $355 million civil fraud judgment that Trump is appealing. But Trump’s legal entanglements over the past year have only fueled his support among Republican voters, boosting him far ahead of his one-time rivals for the nomination.
‘This one got us over the top,’ Trump said of his Tuesday primary victories in his video, which was posted on social media. ‘This is a big deal.’
And he argued that ‘our nation is failing,’ charged that Biden is ‘the worst president in the history of our country’ and said that ‘he must be defeated.’
In a statement as he clinched the nomination, Biden took aim at his Republican challenger, charging that ‘Donald Trump is running a campaign of resentment, revenge, and retribution that threatens the very idea of America.’
‘Voters now have a choice to make about the future of this country. Are we going to stand up and defend our democracy or let others tear it down? Will we restore the right to choose and protect our freedoms or let extremists take them away? Will we finally make the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes – or will we allow corporate greed to run rampant on the backs of the middle class?’ Biden asked. ‘I believe that the American people will choose to keep us moving into the future.’