Trump mocks absence of Haley’s husband during South Carolina coronation

The tour manager messed up. Or just earned a raise. The venue was too small, but the star turn looked delighted.

In the bright lunchtime sunshine on the campus of Coastal Carolina University, the crowd had been swelling since midday but passed through the security barriers to find the auditorium already full. They had no choice but to wait outside, finding shade under the trees.

Conway, in Horry County, South Carolina, is adjacent to golf-and-beach country. Just a quick drive down the highway, past a mind-blowing squadron of enemy-of-arteries eateries, are the rarefied gates of Myrtle Beach National.

Not long after that is the long pleasure dome of the resort itself, which is desolate until April. But the college, neoclassical and built on sprawling woodlands, was the epicentre of the weekend energy on Saturday.

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Shortly before two o’clock, a ripple of excitement was quickly transformed into a clamour of adoration and the instant hoisting of a thousand phones to record the moment when Donald Trump materialised before them.

A lead motorcycle escort, then half a dozen black SUVs, then another cavalcade of motorcycle police and then more SUVs containing armed guards who quickly took up strategic positions on the ground and on the roof.

“Holy s**t!”

“Can you see him?”

The profile of the crowd ranged from collegiate to those who remember America in the 1960s and before, but what pulled the generations together was their adoration of the familiar figure in the suit with white shirt and red tie who took his place on a small stage to address those outside who were disappointed.

A chant of “We want Trump” evolved into “U.S.A.” when the candidate took up the microphone and beamed out at the crowd.

“I just want to thank this state, it has been so incredible. So, we have a country that is failing, a country we feel bad about. Four years ago, we were a great nation and now we are a nation that’s been laughed at, and we are not going to stand for it. And we are going to win in November.”

This was a different energy to the snowy night in New Hampshire a few weeks ago. This was a more direct voltage of the human energy that vitalises Trump. By the time he appeared on stage inside, about half an hour later, many of those outside had begun to drift away. It had been a long wait in the February heat, and they’d been expecting a seat inside.

But Trump was still buoyed by that fanatical greeting that awaited him. “I have never seen such spirit as we have now,” he told those inside.

“You look outside. I mean this is a big place, but I think there are four or five times the number outside. We have big screens outside. I made a short speech, but we are gonna have to come back and use the airport or something.”

At that, they cheered on both sides of the wall of the auditorium.

The moment spoke volumes for the almost impossible task facing Nikki Haley in her home state. The alternative Republican held rallies about a two-hour drive away on Saturday afternoon, but her supporters couldn’t hope to compete with the fervour of this event.

“Because he is truly, truly for us,” Rhonda Watts replied when asked what it is that generates this rawness of emotion among Trump supporters. She is a South Carolinian and had made a short journey with her friends: Robin Jacques and the Woodards, Angie and Dickie. They were more pleased by the scale of the crowd than disappointed not to have made it inside.

“It feels that way,” Dickie agreed.

“He does love America and what it used to be. We are moving away from what this country was 30 years ago.”

Anywhere you go, you hear Trump Republicans mentioning this: a sense of something lost and of their country drifting away from a more relatable state of being.

“I would say wokeism,” Dickie says when asked about the main concern of that drift.

“Leftist leanings. It seems like the 1 per cent is the majority in voice. That might be the media behind it and pushing their agenda. You hear a lot of leftist, socialist, Marxist ... they all seem intertwined and be the same beast. And it seems to be where they want to take this country.

“And I think a lot of it might be ... I want to say European, world economic forum sort of power. I don’t think they ever liked this country, and they are trying to take it over from the inside. That’s what it seems like to me.”

The group are not anti-Haley. Rhonda and Angie both voted for her.

“I love Haley,” says Rhonda.

“I just think Trump can take us places. He showed just that. He accomplished so much, and he got very little praise.”

Like most people who turned up at the college, they are backing Trump because they see in him a lone crusader who can arrest what they see as a dismaying transition across the country.

“We grew up with the United States label. Made in the United States. That’s a big thing. We want it back,” Rhonda points out.

They aren’t convinced by the pollsters and Haley theory that if she was the Republican nominee, she would convincingly beat Biden.

“I mean, it was voter fraud last time,” says Angie.

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“I hate to say it, but it was. It disgusts us. “I was worried about that [for this election], but I heard precautions and steps have been taken to prevent that happening.”

In the warm sunshine, Trump’s introductory remarks drew laughs. There’s a pattern to his themes, but he ad-libs as he pleases and at one point, during a riff that moved from his imitations of Joe Biden leaving the stage to the defeat in the Senate on Wednesday of the immigration bill, he turned his attention to Haley and remembered one of their meetings when she promised she wouldn’t run against him.

“And then I decided to run, and I said one person I know I have is Nikki. Tricky Nikki! I have Haley. So, I called various people [for] endorsements. And she didn’t return my call. And then I call her again and again and finally she returns my call and says sorry I’m with someone,” he told the crowd, adding: “Birdbrain loves mass asylum. There is nothing nice about her,” he said.

“She brought her husband. Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away. What happened to her husband? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.”

It was that remark, out of the thousands of words that Trump spoke to the crowd in Conway over a two-hour address, that provoked a rebuke from Haley.

Michael Haley, as she often tells supporters at her rallies, is a military veteran stationed in Africa. “If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s licence, let alone being president of the United States,” she said with anger.

That exchange may have marked the breakdown of civilities between Haley and Trump for the next fortnight as he seeks to lay claim to South Carolina and complete a primary campaign that has been not so much a race as a coronation.

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