Aaron Bushnell yelled ‘Free Palestine!’ then lit himself on fire near the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.
A member of the United States air force who had set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in an apparent protest against Israel’s war in Gaza has died, the Pentagon says.
The 25-year-old airman, Aaron Bushnell of San Antonio, Texas, died from his injuries, the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC, said on Monday.
US media reports said Bushnell livestreamed himself on the social media platform Twitch wearing fatigues and declaring he would “not be complicit in genocide” before dousing himself in liquid on Sunday.
He then lit himself on fire while yelling “Free Palestine!” until he fell to the ground. The footage has since been removed from Twitch.
In a statement, the air force said on Monday: “The individual involved in yesterday’s incident succumbed to his injuries and passed away last night.”
The air force said it would provide additional information a day after military officials complete notifying his next of kin.
The incident comes as protests against Israel’s war on Gaza continue across the US.
In December, a protester set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. A Palestinian flag was found at the scene, and the act was believed to be one of “extreme political protest”.
Israel launched an assault on Gaza after Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,139 people and seizing about 250 as hostages.
Since those attacks, Israel has bombarded the Palestinian territory from air, land and sea and launched a ground invasion. More than 29,000 people have been killed in the Israeli assault, according to Palestinian authorities.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has left much of the territory in ruins and displaced more than 80 percent of its population.
Farmers have clashed violently with police in the European quarter of Brussels, spraying officers with liquid manure and setting fire to mounds of tyres, while the EU’s agriculture ministers met to discuss the crisis in their sector.
As farmers also protested in Madrid and on the Polish-German border, at least 900 tractors jammed streets in the centre of the Belgian capital, police said, with protesters throwing bottles and eggs and setting off fireworks while riot police fired water cannon.
Farmers from Spain, Portugal and Italy joined their Belgian counterparts for the latest show of force by a months-long, Europe-wide movement demanding action on high costs, low product prices, cheap non-EU imports and strict EU environmental rules.
The rolling protests, which on Saturday led to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, being heckled by furious farmers at the Paris agricultural fair, have unnerved leaders before European elections in June that are likely to produce major gains for far-right populist parties.
Ministers were meeting to debate European Commission proposals to ease the pressure on farmers, including simplifying the bloc’s common agricultural policy (CAP) by reducing farm inspections and exempting small farms from some green rules.
“We need something practical, something operational,” said the French agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau, adding that while there was room for “adjustments within the current rules,” meeting some demands “would require changing the legislation”.
Fesneau said it did not matter whether the changes were made before or after the European parliament elections, but “what matters now is moving forward. We need to set a goal, lay the foundations of a CAP that reassures people.”
Germany’s agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir, said the EU needed to ensure farmers could make a fair living if they opted for biodiversity and environmental measures. He said the average farmer “spends a quarter of their time at their desks” because of the EU’s “bureaucracy monster”.
David Clarinval, the Belgian agriculture minister, said farmers’ complaints had been “clearly heard” but urged them to refrain from violence, while the Irish agriculture minister, Charlie McConalogue said the priority must be to slash red tape.
The EU should ensure that policies were “straightforward, that they’re proportionate and they’re as simple as possible for farmers to implement”, he said, underlining that “we do respect the massively important work that farmers carry out every day in terms of producing food”.
The EU has already rowed back on several parts of its flagship green deal plan in an effort to appease farmers, scrapping references to farming emissions from its 2040 climate roadmap, withdrawing a law to cut pesticide use and delaying a target for farmers to leave some land fallow to improve biodiversity.
The bloc has also introduced safeguards to stop Ukrainian imports flooding the market under a tariff-free scheme introduced after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The protest was farmers’ second in Brussels in recent weeks.
“We are getting ignored,” said Marieke Van De Vivere, a farmer from Belgium’s Ghent region. She said ministers should “be reasonable to us, come with us on a day to work on the field, or with the horses or with the animals, to see that it is not very easy … because of the rules they put on us”.
Morgan Ody, from La Via Campesina small farmers’ organisation, said that for most farmers it was “about income. It’s about the fact that we are poor, and that we want to make a decent living,” Ody said.
She called on the EU to set up minimum support prices and exit free trade agreements that enable the import of cheaper foreign produce. “We are not against climate policies. But we know that in order to do the transition, we need higher prices for products because it costs more to produce in an ecological way,” she said.
Farmers also protested on Monday in Madrid, blowing whistles, ringing cowbells and beating drums as they demanded that the EU cut red tape and drop some of the CAP. “The new CAP is ruining our lives,” said Juan Pedro Laguna, 46.
Roberto Rodriguez, who grows cereal and beetroots in the central province of Avila, said it was “impossible to stand these rules, they want us to work on the field during the day and deal with paperwork at night – we’re sick of the bureaucracy”.
Polish farmers protesting against EU regulations and cheap food imports from Ukraine blocked a motorway at a busy border crossing with Germany on Monday and plan to protest in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Tuesday.
Adrian Wawrzyniak, a spokesperson for the Solidarity farmers’ union, said that as far as he knew “there are also German farmers on the German side – the crossing is blocked from both sides. This is a show of joint solidarity.”
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Monday that farmers’ problems needed fixing at an EU level. “Poland is the first EU country [on the border with Ukraine], but in fact it is a problem of the EU as a whole, of EU agriculture as a whole, and it should be considered in this context,” he told a press conference.
A US Air Force member who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC has died.
The victim, who was an airman on active duty, had set himself ablaze in an apparent act of protest against the war in Gaza.
He had said he would "no longer be complicit in genocide," according to the AP news agency.
Air force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said the man had "succumbed to his injuries and passed away last night."
No further details were released.
Image:Police at the scene. Pic: WJLA/AP
The man walked up to the embassy on Sunday and began livestreaming on the video streaming platform Twitch, the report said, citing a person familiar with the matter.
He then doused himself in accelerant and ignited the flames, before collapsing to the ground.
The video has been removed from the platform.
He also yelled "Free Palestine", according to NBC, Sky News' US partner.
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The flames were extinguished by Secret Service agents and the man was taken to hospital.
Israel has denied allegations of genocide in Gaza, saying it is carrying out operations in accordance with international law.
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Alexei Navalny was about to be freed in a prisoner swap when he died, according to his ally Maria Pevchikh.
She said the Russian opposition leader was going to be exchanged for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hitman who is serving a life sentence for murder in Germany.
Two US citizens currently held in Russia were also going to be part of the deal, Ms Pevchikh claimed.
She added that negotiations were at their final stage on 15 February.
The next day, Mr Navalny died in his cell in the prison colony in Siberia where he was being held on a 19-year sentence over charges that were widely seen as politically motivated. Prison officials said the 47-year-old had fallen ill following a "walk".
In a video posted on Mr Navalny's YouTube channel, Ms Pevchikh, who is the chairwoman of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), said negotiations for a prisoner swap had been under way for two years.
She added that after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 "it was clear that Putin would stop at nothing" and that Mr Navalny "had to be freed from jail at any cost, and urgently".
According to Ms Pevchik, Mr Navalny was going to be freed under a humanitarian exchange and American and German officials were involved in the talks.
The process finally resulted in a concrete plan for a prisoner swap in December, she said.
Vadim Krasikov - a Russian who was found guilty of shooting former Chechen rebel commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in the head at close range in Germany in 2019 - was going to be part of the deal.
Two US nationals currently held in Russia were also going to be exchanged, Ms Pevchikh said, although she did not name them.
However, earlier in February, President Putin told US host Tucker Carlson that talks were ongoing with the US about freeing American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who is being held on espionage charges.
President Putin hinted that in exchange Russia would accept a person who "due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals… during the events in the Caucasus" - almost certainly a reference to Krasikov.
According to Ms Pevchikh, Russian President Vladimir Putin changed his mind about the deal at the last minute. She said he "could not tolerate Navalny being free" - and since there was an agreement "in principle" for Krasikov's freeing, Mr Putin decided to "just get rid of the bargaining chip" and "offer someone else when the time comes."
"Putin has gone mad with hatred for Navalny," Ms Pevchikh said. "He knows Navalny could've defeated him."
As a former KGB officer, President Putin is used to saying - or promising - one thing, and then doing something completely different.
It is a policy he and his government have been consistently implementing for almost a quarter of a century.
Up until the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Putin and several Russian officials repeatedly denied there was a plan to invade the country.
Although we do not know what exactly happened to Navalny in prison, engaging in negotiations on his release without intending to set him free would fit the Kremlin's behaviour over the past years.
Within an hour of publication, Ms Pevchikh's video had had hundreds of thousands of views.
The Kremlin has not yet reacted to the claims put forward by Ms Pevchikh, but President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has previously said allegations of government involvement into Navalny's death were "absurd".
Authorities initially refused to hand Navalny's body over to his mother, only relenting eight days after his death.
On Monday, Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmish posted a message on social media saying his allies were looking for a venue where supporters could hold a public farewell later this week.
Such an event is expected to be closely monitored by the authorities, provided it is allowed to go ahead at all.
A rights group said 400 Russians were arrested across the country for laying flower tributes to Navalny following his death.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that it was not clear yet whether a hostage deal would materialise from ongoing talks, declining to discuss specifics, but said Hamas needed to “come down to a reasonable situation”.
“They’re in another planet. But if they come down to a reasonable situation, then yes we’ll have a hostage deal. I hope so,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Netanyahu’s comments cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a deal.
“Netanyahu’s comments show he is not concerned about reaching an agreement,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters, accusing the Israeli leader of wanting “to pursue negotiation under bombardment and the bloodshed (of Palestinians)”.
Negotiators from Israel, Qatar, Egypt and the US have agreed the “basic contours” of an arrangement during weekend talks in Paris, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN, but the final details still have to be hammered out.
Israeli media reported that the prospective deal would allow for the release of 30 or 40 hostages in exchange for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners, and a ceasefire lasting up to six weeks.
Both sides would continue negotiations during the pause for further releases and a permanent ceasefire, an Egyptian official told the Associated Press.
The break in fighting would cover the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts around 10 March this year, and the deal would include an increase in desperately needed aid.
After initial talks in Paris, follow-up discussions will be held in Doha and Cairo, Egyptian security sources told Reuters.
The UN rights chief has decried disinformation and other attacks that aim to “undermine the legitimacy” and work of the UN and other institutions, describing them as “profoundly destructive”.
Speaking at the opening of the UN human rights council’s main annual session, Volker Turk criticised widespread “disinformation that targets UN humanitarian organisations, UN peacekeepers and my office”.
Turk said:
The UN has become a lightning rod for manipulative propaganda and a scapegoat for policy failures.
This is profoundly destructive of the common good, and it callously betrays the many people whose lives rely on it.
During his opening speech, the UN high commissioner for human rights stressed that the UN was “uniquely equipped to enable states to discuss and resolve pressing global issues”.
“This convening power is particularly vital now, when the magnitude of conflict, planetary peril and digital transformation requires urgent solutions,” he said, in quotes carried by AFP.
Turk pointed to “the pain and the slaughter of so many people in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti and so many other places around the world”, which he described as “unbearable”.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Monday it had downed an Israeli Hermes 450 drone over Lebanese territory with a surface-to-air missile, the second time it has announced bringing down this type of unmanned aerial vehicle.
Reuters reports:
The Hermes 450 is an Israeli multi-payload drone made by Elbit Systems, an Israel-based weapons manufacturer.
The Israeli military said on Monday that two missile launches had targeted an Israeli Air Force UAV operating over Lebanon.
The first, it said, was intercepted by Israel’s ‘David’s Sling’ Aerial defence system but the drone “fell inside Lebanese territory” after a second launch.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has said it has downed or seized control of several Israeli drones in the months since it began exchanging fire with the Israeli military across Lebanon’s southern border.
At least 29,782 Palestinians have been killed and 70,043 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday.
In the past 24 hours, 90 Palestinians were killed and 164 injured in Israeli strikes, the ministry added.
Most of the casualties have been women and children, the ministry has said, and thousands more bodies are likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has criticised the UN security council for failing to adequately respond to Israel’s war in Gaza and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he said had “perhaps fatally” undermined its authority.
He said at the opening of the UN human rights council in Geneva:
The council’s lack of unity on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and on Israel’s military operations in Gaza following the horrific terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October, has severely - perhaps fatally - undermined its authority.
The council needs serious reform to its composition and working methods.
The US last week again vetoed a draft UN security council resolution blocking a demand for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. It was the third US veto of a draft resolution since 7 October.
Washington was widely lambasted for using its veto again at a time when nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2 million people are under threat of famine.
The US has drafted an alternative resolution, which calls for a temporary ceasefire “as soon as practicable”, and calls on Israel not to proceed with a planned offensive on Rafah, the southernmost Gazan city where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge.
Explaining the veto, the US envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that Joe Biden was in the midst of negotiations with Israel, Egypt and Qatar aimed at clinching a comprehensive hostage deal.
Guterres, who described Rafah as the core of the humanitarian aid operation in the Palestinian enclave, said a full-scale Israeli assault there would have devastating consequences.
“An all-out Israeli offensive on the city would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there; it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programmes,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, has told a press conference that he submitted his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas.
Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, reportedly submitted his resignation at the opening of a government meeting in Ramallah in the West Bank on Monday.
He said he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements following Israel’s war in Gaza.
Shtayyeh said the next stage would “require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the emerging reality in the Gaza Strip, the national unity talks, and the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian consensus”.
In addition, it would require “the extension of the Authority’s authority over the entire land, Palestine”.
The move comes amid growing US pressure on Abbas to shake up the PA as international efforts have intensified to stop the war and begin work on a political structure to govern the enclave afterwards.
Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, when it expelled the PA following its win in elections the previous year, and unlike the PA does not believe in a two-state solution since this would require the recognition of Israel.
The PA in the West Bank does recognise Israel, but is widely seen as in need of reform and democratic accountability.
Israel’s war in Gaza has displaced the vast majority of the population from their homes and left civilians facing acute shortages of food, water and medicine.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are hungry, some desperately so, and aid agencies describe “pockets of famine” in the territory.
“We have no food or drink for ourselves or our children,” Omar al-Kahlout told AFP, as he waited near Gaza City for aid trucks to arrive.
“We are trapped in the north and there is no aid reaching us - the situation is extremely difficult.”
Three UN agencies - the WFP, the World Health Organization and children’s agency UNICEF - said last week that food and safe water were “incredibly scarce and diseases are rife...resulting in a surge of acute malnutrition” in Gaza.
The food crisis is particularly serious in the north, where in January one in six children under the age of two were reported as acutely malnourished, and where “the situation is likely to be even graver today”, the agencies said.
Aid officials have said that between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these, the UN said “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access and nine were postponed”.
Israel, which checks all trucks entering Gaza from both crossings, blames the UN for the fall-off in deliveries, and says it is prepared to speed up the clearance of aid.
The UN says it is becoming more difficult to distribute aid inside Gaza because of the collapse of security inside the strip.
Al Jazeera has reported from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest hospital and crucial to the territory’s crippled health services:
Despite the Israeli military’s statement that it has completed operations inside Nasser hospital, snipers are still in the vicinity of the hospital and, tragically, are still shooting at anything moving near it.
There is also still an ongoing blockade of relief convoys, stopping fuel or water supplies from reaching those inside the hospital.
The Israeli military previously conducted mass arrests of about 200 people in or around the hospital, including medical staff and patients. Their fate is unknown. Nobody knows where they are or what’s going to happen to them.
A man identified as a US air force member was left in a critical condition after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, authorities said.
The Metropolitan police department said it responded to an incident on International Drive around 1pm on Sunday to assist the Secret Service. Fire and emergency services said the man had serious burns.
“An adult male was transported by DC fire and EMS [emergency medical services] to a local hospital where they remain in critical condition,” the police department said on Twitter/X.
A video posted online showed a man in a uniform shouting “Free Palestine” as he burned while identifying himself as an active air force member.
The man was reportedly on fire for about a minute before law enforcement put it out.
You can read the full story here:
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that it was not clear yet whether a hostage deal would materialise from ongoing talks, declining to discuss specifics, but said Hamas needed to “come down to a reasonable situation”.
“They’re in another planet. But if they come down to a reasonable situation, then yes we’ll have a hostage deal. I hope so,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Netanyahu’s comments cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a deal.
“Netanyahu’s comments show he is not concerned about reaching an agreement,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters, accusing the Israeli leader of wanting “to pursue negotiation under bombardment and the bloodshed (of Palestinians)”.
Negotiators from Israel, Qatar, Egypt and the US have agreed the “basic contours” of an arrangement during weekend talks in Paris, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN, but the final details still have to be hammered out.
Israeli media reported that the prospective deal would allow for the release of 30 or 40 hostages in exchange for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners, and a ceasefire lasting up to six weeks.
Both sides would continue negotiations during the pause for further releases and a permanent ceasefire, an Egyptian official told the Associated Press.
The break in fighting would cover the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts around 10 March this year, and the deal would include an increase in desperately needed aid.
After initial talks in Paris, follow-up discussions will be held in Doha and Cairo, Egyptian security sources told Reuters.
We are restarting our live coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
Senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, has said comments by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a ceasefire deal.
On Sunday, Netanyahu spoke to US media and said a deal would only delay Israel’s planned assault on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.
US Central Command (Centcom) said that the Houthis fired an anti-ship ballistic missile that likely targeted a US-flagged owned and operated tanker in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday evening. It said the missile missed and landed in the water, therefore not causing any damage or injuries. “Earlier in the evening, at about 9pm (Sanaa time), US Centcom forces shot down two one-way attack unmanned aerial vehicles over the southern Red Sea in self-defence. A third UAV crashed from an assessed in-flight failure,” it added in a post on X.
Israeli forces killed more than 30 Palestinian gunmen in Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, more than 10 in the central Gaza Strip and others in the southern city of Khan Younis, the military said on Monday in a summary of the last 24 hours’ operations.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said that the “looming famine” and the blockage of food aid into parts of Gaza was a “man made disaster”. He said the last time the UNRWA was able to deliver food aid to northern Gaza was on 23 January. “Our calls to send food aid have been denied & have fallen on deaf ears. This is a man made disaster. The world committed to never let famine happen again. Famine can still be avoided, through genuine political will to grant access & protection to meaningful assistance,” Lazzarini wrote on X.
Benjamin Netanyahu convened the war cabinet late on Saturday for a briefing with negotiators who had been at ceasefire talks in Paris. This week, it will meet again to discuss preparations for an assault on Rafah. A deal might delay that operation, but would not prevent it, Netanyahu said in an interview with CBS.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that negotiators from the US, Egypt, Qatar and Israel came to an understanding on the basic contours of a hostage deal during talks in Paris. The deal is still under negotiation, said Sullivan, who added there will have to be indirect discussions by Qatar and Egypt with Hamas.
The death toll in Gaza is likely to pass the grim milestone of 30,000 this week. Israeli strikes have killed 29,692 Palestinians in Gaza since October, two-thirds of them women and children, and injured 69,879, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Iran condemned the latest strikes by the US and the UK on Yemen, saying they were seeking to “escalate tensions and crises” in the region.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has been forced to “stretch every dollar” and juggle its finances in order to continue work in Gaza after 18 donor countries suspended funding over allegations of links to Hamas. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing a shortfall of $450m from a budget of $880m.
Nikki Haley’s home state comeback didn’t materialise. Now what?
It all came down to this: Nikki Haley had her shot on Saturday to prove this was still a contest. She failed.
South Carolina has now voted. It was the fifth Republican primary or caucus, after three previous states and the US Virgin Islands were all won by her opponent, frontrunner Donald Trump. Finally, the race turned to Ms Haley’s backyard.
In any other contest, a popular two-term governor and former UN ambassador would be presumed to take her home state. Instead, Ms Haley heads into her Charleston election night watch party down 30 points in all available polling and still struggling to make inroads with the conservative Republican base which is firmly backing Mr Trump.
She appears to have the fundraising momentum of a candidate with the wind at her back, but is not yet showing any signs of pulling off a victory in any individual state, writes my colleague John Bowden.
Trump’s potential weaknesses in a general election
Donald Trump has an iron grip on the Republican base, but that might not be enough of a coalition to guarantee a win in November’s general election.
South Carolina was a chance to show that he can expand his coalition beyond voters who are white, older and without a college degree. But about nine in 10 of South Carolina’s primary voters were white, making it hard to see if Mr Trump has made inroads with Black voters whom he has attempted to win over.
Nikki Haley outpaced Mr Trump among college-educated voters, a relative weakness for him that could matter in November as people with college degrees are a growing share of the overall electorate. Even though South Carolina Republican voters believe that Mr Trump can win in November, some had worries about his viability.
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump gestures to supporters at an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds on 24 February 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina
(Getty Images)
About half of Republican voters in South Carolina — including about a quarter of his supporters — are concerned that Mr Trump is too extreme to win the general election.
About three in 10 voters believe he acted illegally in at least one of the criminal cases against him, even though about seven in 10 believe the investigations are political attempts to undermine him.
Mr Trump dominates among conservative voters. But his challenge is that those voters were just 37 per cent of the electorate in the November 2020 presidential election. The other 63 per cent identified as moderate or liberal, the two categories that Mr Trump lost to Haley in South Carolina.
At the age of 52, Ms Haley has bet that she can offer a generational change for the GOP. But the future she articulated has little basis in the present-day GOP, even in South Carolina, where she previously won two terms as governor. About four in 10 of South Carolina Republicans — including about six in 10 of those supporting Donald Trump — say they have an unfavorable opinion of her.
Ms Haley has said she will stay in the race until at least the Super Tuesday primaries, though so far there are no signs that she has disrupted Mr Trump’s momentum. She’s struggled to convince the core of the Republican Party that she’s a better choice than the former president — losing most conservatives and those without a college degree to Mr Trump.
Republican US presidential candidate Nikki Haley is greeted by supporters after speaking at a South Carolina Republican presidential Primary night event in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, 24 February 2024
Who is her coalition? Ms Haley dominated among South Carolina voters who correctly said that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Roughly three-quarters of her supporters say Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020, and about four in 10 voted for Mr Biden in that election. Her problem is that about six in 10 Republican primary voters say they believed Mr Biden was not legitimately elected.
Why AP called South Carolina for Trump: Race call explained
The Associated Press declared Donald Trump the winner of the South Carolina primary as soon as polls closed on Saturday. The race call was based on a comprehensive survey of South Carolina Republican primary voters that showed him defeating Nikki Haley by wide margins in her home state.
Declaring a winner as polls close based on the results of the AP’s VoteCast survey — and before election officials publicly release tabulated votes — is not unusual in heavily lopsided contests like Saturday’s primary. The survey confirms the findings of pre-Election Day polls showing Trump far outpacing Haley statewide.
The AP called the race for Trump at 7 p.m., when polls closed statewide.
VoteCast results show Trump winning on a scale similar to his earlier victories in every contest so far where he appeared on the ballot. In South Carolina, the former president is winning by huge margins in every geographic region of the state, from Upcountry in the north to Low Country on the Atlantic coast.
The survey also shows Trump with sizable leads across the state’s political geography, winning among Republican primary voters from areas that vote heavily Republican in general elections to those that vote heavily Democratic, as well as everywhere in between. Haley’s strongest support according to VoteCast was among voters with postgraduate degrees, but they make up a small share of the overall electorate.
Haley’s likeliest path to victory relied on posting strong numbers in more Democratic-friendly areas, while staying competitive in traditionally Republican areas.
Haley previously served as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations. In her last competitive GOP primary in South Carolina in 2010, some of the areas where she performed best were in counties that tend to support Democrats in general elections. But VoteCast shows Haley not performing anywhere near the level she needs to pull off an upset.
Another key metric is votes cast before Election Day, which tend to be among the first votes reported of the night.
Since the issue of early voting became highly politicized in the 2020 presidential election, pre-Election Day votes have skewed Democratic, while Election Day votes have skewed Republican. With much of Haley’s support coming from more moderate voters this campaign, she would have needed a strong showing among early voters in order to withstand the votes later in the night from more conservative voters who voted on Election Day. While VoteCast showed Haley performing slightly better among early voters than she did among Election Day voters, she trailed badly behind Trump in both groups.
When all the votes are counted, Trump may come close to doubling the 33% he received in his 2016 South Carolina victory against a far more competitive six-way field. That year he carried 44 of 46 counties, all but Richland and Charleston, the state’s second- and third-most populous.
VoteCast provides a detailed snapshot of the electorate and helps explain who voted, what issues they care about, how they feel about the candidates and why they voted the way they did.
Donald Trump celebrated his comfortable victory in the South Carolina Republican primary by predicting that he would beat Joe Biden in a likely presidential election rematch in November. The former president claimed his fourth straight primary win on Saturday night (24 February), beating rival Nikki Haley in her home state. “We’re going to be up here on 5 November, and we’re going to look at Joe Biden,” Mr Trump said as the crown loudly cheered him. “He’s destroying our country and we’re gonna say ‘Joe, you’re fired. Get out. Get out, Joe. You’re fired.’” Mr Trump also compared himself to Al Capone during a CPAC speech on Saturday.
Donald Trump won over South Carolina Republicans as the candidate who voters believe can win in November, keep the country safe and will stand up and fight for them as president.
Mr Trump cruised to victory in the South Carolina primary with the support of an almost unwavering base of loyal voters. AP VoteCast found that Republicans in the state are broadly aligned with his goals: Many question the value of supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia; and overwhelming majorities see immigrants as hurting the US and suspect that there are nefarious political motives behind Mr Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.
About six in 10 South Carolina voters consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement, the slogan that helped catapult Mr Trump to the White House in 2016. About nine in 10 Trump voters said they were driven by their support for him, not by objections to his opponent. Nikki Haley’s voters were much more divided: About half were motivated by supporting her, but nearly as many turned out to oppose Mr Trump.
AP VoteCast is a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.
Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump stands on stage as he hosts a South Carolina Republican presidential primary election night party in Columbia, South Carolina, US, 24 February 2024
Mr Trump’s victory in South Carolina looked remarkably similar to his wins in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. It’s a sign that regional differences that once existed within the GOP have been supplanted by a national movement that largely revolves around the former president.
Mr Trump, 77, won in South Carolina with voters who are white and do not have a college degree, one of his core constituencies. About two-thirds of his backers in this election fell into that group.
A majority believe Mr Trump is a candidate who can emerge victorious in November’s general election, while only about half say the same of Ms Haley. Voters were also far more likely to view Mr Trump than Ms Haley as someone who would “stand up and fight for people like you” and to say he would keep the country safe. And about seven in 10 say he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president.
Mr Trump’s voters also backed his more nationalist views — they are more likely than Haley’s supporters to have lukewarm views of the Nato alliance or even consider it bad for the US., to say immigrants are hurting the country and to say immigration is the top issue facing the country.
‘Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign'
Ms Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign, not just an effort to provide GOP bigwigs with an alternative at a brokered convention.
Haley supporters who piled onto the shore at Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant on Friday evening were well aware of this. At least one expressed doubts to The Independent that the GOP would even consider Ms Haley were Mr Trump to be hopelessly sidelined from the presidential race by a criminal conviction, a mountain of legal fees, or some combination of both.
With a picturesque sunset illuminating the silhouette of an aircraft carrier to her back, Nikki Haley’s effort to barnstorm her home state came to an end on Friday. She descended from the steps of her massive tour bus, the “Beast of the Southeast”, after several triumphant honks (and an admission from Congressman Ralph Norman that they had initially missed their turn). Addressing supporters who cheered when she joked that Donald Trump had permanently “banned” them from the Maga movement, Ms Haley made her case once again for the GOP to move on from a 91-times-indicted former president who she fiercely attacked for devaluing the military service of American troops, including her own husband.
Donald Trump celebrated his comfortable victory in the South Carolina Republican primary by predicting that he would beat Joe Biden in a likely presidential election rematch in November. The former president claimed his fourth straight primary win on Saturday night (24 February), beating rival Nikki Haley in her home state. “We’re going to be up here on 5 November, and we’re going to look at Joe Biden,” Mr Trump said as the crown loudly cheered him. “He’s destroying our country and we’re gonna say ‘Joe, you’re fired. Get out. Get out, Joe. You’re fired.’” Mr Trump also compared himself to Al Capone during a CPAC speech on Saturday.
Donald Trump won over South Carolina Republicans as the candidate who voters believe can win in November, keep the country safe and will stand up and fight for them as president.
Mr Trump cruised to victory in the South Carolina primary with the support of an almost unwavering base of loyal voters. AP VoteCast found that Republicans in the state are broadly aligned with his goals: Many question the value of supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia; and overwhelming majorities see immigrants as hurting the US and suspect that there are nefarious political motives behind Mr Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.
About six in 10 South Carolina voters consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement, the slogan that helped catapult Mr Trump to the White House in 2016. About nine in 10 Trump voters said they were driven by their support for him, not by objections to his opponent. Nikki Haley’s voters were much more divided: About half were motivated by supporting her, but nearly as many turned out to oppose Mr Trump.
AP VoteCast is a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.
Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump stands on stage as he hosts a South Carolina Republican presidential primary election night party in Columbia, South Carolina, US, 24 February 2024
Mr Trump’s victory in South Carolina looked remarkably similar to his wins in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. It’s a sign that regional differences that once existed within the GOP have been supplanted by a national movement that largely revolves around the former president.
Mr Trump, 77, won in South Carolina with voters who are white and do not have a college degree, one of his core constituencies. About two-thirds of his backers in this election fell into that group.
A majority believe Mr Trump is a candidate who can emerge victorious in November’s general election, while only about half say the same of Ms Haley. Voters were also far more likely to view Mr Trump than Ms Haley as someone who would “stand up and fight for people like you” and to say he would keep the country safe. And about seven in 10 say he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president.
Mr Trump’s voters also backed his more nationalist views — they are more likely than Haley’s supporters to have lukewarm views of the Nato alliance or even consider it bad for the US., to say immigrants are hurting the country and to say immigration is the top issue facing the country.
‘Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign'
Ms Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign, not just an effort to provide GOP bigwigs with an alternative at a brokered convention.
Haley supporters who piled onto the shore at Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant on Friday evening were well aware of this. At least one expressed doubts to The Independent that the GOP would even consider Ms Haley were Mr Trump to be hopelessly sidelined from the presidential race by a criminal conviction, a mountain of legal fees, or some combination of both.
With a picturesque sunset illuminating the silhouette of an aircraft carrier to her back, Nikki Haley’s effort to barnstorm her home state came to an end on Friday. She descended from the steps of her massive tour bus, the “Beast of the Southeast”, after several triumphant honks (and an admission from Congressman Ralph Norman that they had initially missed their turn). Addressing supporters who cheered when she joked that Donald Trump had permanently “banned” them from the Maga movement, Ms Haley made her case once again for the GOP to move on from a 91-times-indicted former president who she fiercely attacked for devaluing the military service of American troops, including her own husband.
Donald Trump’s win gave him a clean sweep of all five nominating contests so far: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the US Virgin Islands and now South Carolina. Saturday’s result has to be especially frustrating for Nikki Haley, who became a political star in the Deep South state where she served as governor for six years.
She invested more time, money and effort in campaigning ahead of the primary, while Mr Trump held just a handful of rallies. At the same time, she watched as much of the state’s political establishment turned their back on her and sided with the former president.
Perhaps most vexing was how poorly Haley did with veterans after she took Mr Trump to task for criticising her husband, an officer in the South Carolina National Guard currently on deployment to Africa, for being absent on the campaign trail. Ms Haley also played up the former president’s past disrespectful comments about the late US senator John McCain, a decorated Vietnam vet.
Republican US presidential candidate Nikki Haley on primary day in Charleston, South Carolina
According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Mr Trump won 67 per cent of the vote of those who served in the US Armed Forces compared with just 33 per cent for Ms Haley.
Perhaps it was not surprising given how veterans told Reuters that even though they faulted Mr Trump for his remarks, they were standing by him. Some were concerned Ms Haley’s aggressive foreign policy views could lead the United States into another war.
According to Edison, 47 per cent of Republicans felt the US should take a less active role in world affairs, and Mr Trump won nearly 77 per cent of those voters. But Mr Trump also won the lion’s share of voters (60 per cent) who believed that the US should take a more active role.
If all of that left Ms Haley and her team scratching their heads, you couldn’t blame them.
Trump takes on Haley with border security issues, indicate exit polls
Exit polls also made something else clear: Donald Trump has boxed out Nikki Haley on the issue of immigration and border security.
That mattered in South Carolina, where 37 per cent of voters listed immigration as their top priority. Of those voters, 82 per cent backed Mr Trump and just 18 per cent supported Ms Haley. And of the 66 per cent of voters who believe undocumented immigrants should be deported to their countries of origin, 77 per cent voted for Mr Trump.
At campaign events, Ms Haley has argued that she, too, takes a hard line on immigration, but Republicans don’t seem to be buying it. Mr Trump’s campaign this week released a TV ad titled “Weakness” that claimed Ms Haley opposed the former president’s so-called Muslim “travel ban” during his administration and questioned the need for a wall along the US border with Mexico.
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak to supporters during an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds on 24 February 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina
(Getty Images)
The site FactCheck.org called the ad misleading, noting that Ms Haley has been supportive of a wall, but she would have favored a more narrowly tailored ban than the one Mr Trump instituted.
Regardless, his attacks seem to have stuck, which does not auger well for Ms Haley’s prospects in a party increasingly consumed by the issue of migrants coming across the border.
Ramaswamy and Kristi Noem tie in CPAC vice president straw poll; Nikki Haley and JD Vance get dead last
As if Saturday could not be any more brutal for Nikki Haley as she lost the presidential primary in her home state of South Carolina, the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference showed movement conservatives do not want her to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
CPAC closed by showing the final results of the CPAC straw poll, which the former Trump adviser said would be to determine who would “ride shotgun” with Mr Trump.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who spoke at the conference on Friday, tied with former presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who headlined CPAC’s Reagan Dinner on Friday and spoke again on Saturday after Mr Trump, at 15 per cent each.
Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has touted her exit from the Democratic Party and spoke on Friday, got second place, with nine per cent of attendees at CPAC supporting her to become Mr Trump’s running mate.
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, a former presidential candidate who has since endorsed Mr Trump, and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, the moderate-turned-MAGA New Yorker, both clocked in at 8 per cent.
But Ms Haley, who spoke at CPAC last year but served as the butt of jokes by many at the conference, only won 2 per cent of the vote, tying her with Ohio Senator JD Vance, who spoke for a sitdown interview at CPAC this year.
McLaughlin & Associates, which serves as Mr Trump’s pollsters, ran the survey, which gives the survey an imprimatur of Trump support, even if it is not exactly scientific.
Trump has work to do despite his win in South Carolina primary
In his victory speech, Donald Trump made it clear that he was looking ahead to a November general election matchup against Democratic president Joe Biden. He didn’t mention Nikki Haley’s name once, apparently in a bid to act as if the primary race is over.
But while it appears increasingly improbable that Ms Haley can wrest the nomination from Mr Trump, his win in South Carolina masked a schism in the party that doesn’t seem to be closing.
Ms Haley was on track to finish with about 40 per cent of the vote, a better performance than polls predicted. Last month in New Hampshire, she took about 43 per cent of the vote.
Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump walks offstage after his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on 24 February 2024 in National Harbor, Maryland
(Getty Images)
“Forty percent is not some tiny group,” she told her supporters on Saturday. “There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”
In both states, Ms Haley’s numbers may have been bolstered by moderates or Democrats who voted in the Republican primary for the purpose of stopping Mr Trump.
In South Carolina, Ms Haley got the larger share of votes from voters who said they had never participated in a Republican primary before, according to exit polls by Edison Research. And 69 per cent of self-described moderates went for her.
For Mr Trump, it means there remains a solid chunk of the Republican electorate - as well as large share of independent voters - that he likely will need to win over if he is going to defeat Biden. As of yet, there’s little sign the former president is doing much to court them.
‘I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now'
“I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump declared, taking the stage for his victory speech mere moments after polls closed. He added, “You can celebrate for about 15 minutes, but then we have to get back to work.”
South Carolina’s first-in-the-South primary has historically been a reliable bellwether for Republicans. In all but one primary since 1980, the Republican winner in South Carolina has gone on to be the party’s nominee. The lone exception was Newt Gingrich in 2012.
Haley said in recent days that she would head straight to Michigan for its Tuesday primary, the last major contest before Super Tuesday. She faces questions about where she might be able to win a contest or be competitive.
Trump and Biden are already behaving like they expect to face off in November.
