By Stephen Macaulay

In 2020 Joe Biden came in fifth in the New Hampshire primary.

Now he is president. Erm, well, while that seems to have been a fact, it seems as though there are quite a number of people in New Hampshire who think that it is an alternative fact, despite their alleged plain-spoken, clear-eyed Yankeeness.

It is just fake news.

As Donald Trump said to the annual VFW convention held in Kansas City on July 24, 2018: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. . . . What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Or, to bring it up to date: Didn’t happen.

Donald Trump received 54.5% of the votes in the New Hampshire primary. Did that really happen?

A Slogan

The New Hampshire slogan, famously, is “Live Free or Die.”

It goes back to General John Stark, New Hampshire’s most famous solider in the American Revolutionary War, the victor of the Battle of Bennington.

The U.S. War of Independence, fought from 1775 to 1793, was in opposition to the British crown, which essentially ran the country (a.k.a., the colonies) from the time the Jamestown colony was established in Virginia. (Sir Walter Raleigh had established the Roanoke Colony in North Carolina in 1585, but mysteriously, by 1590 the colonists had disappeared, just as Donald Trump had predicted the coronavirus would, starting in February 2020 -- he was a bit off, as more than 1 million Americans disappeared from the face of the Earth.)

Donald Trump has said on several occasions that he plans to be a dictator on Day One of his next administration.

Seems like there is a non-trivial number of New Hampshirites whom General John Stark would have no truck with.

After all, he fought against a king, a person with absolute power.

And some 163,700 people in New Hampshire voted for a person who says he wants just that.

Voters So White

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the white population of New Hampshire is 88.8%. The percentage of Asians, which includes those who are from India, is 3.2%.

Not a whole lot of “diversity.”

Is it any wonder that Donald Trump boorishly attacked Nikki Haley’s ethnicity prior to the New Hampshire primary?

Expectations

Haley received 43.2% of the votes. Some 129,646 people voted for her. No doubt there were more than a rounding error who voted for Haley who are not Republicans but who wanted to vote against Trump.

She exceeded expectations.

But the reputationally ornery New Hampshire Republican party members proved themselves to be as homogenized as those in Iowa.

Good and Bad

There is an aphorism that says “The perfect is the enemy of good.”

We’re not talking phone calls here.

A variant on that is “The bad is better than a loss.”

There are a number of Republicans — both those who are pre-Trump Republicans and those who are MAGA Republicans — who have come out in support of Trump with the rationale that it is better to coalesce around him now rather than to have an actual contest.

Trump avoided all debates, so he didn’t have to go up against anyone there.

And evidently Nikki Haley is getting under his skin sufficiently such that he is having trouble with things like facts. (No, he isn’t running against Obama.)

Those Republicans don’t care. They think that as long as there is someone who is ostensibly a Republican in the White House it will be good for them.

Until he decides that he doesn’t like them. And then it won’t be.

John F. Kelly, retired Marine Corps general and former White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, described Trump to Jake Tapper on CNN October 2, 2023: “A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

What would General John Stark think about the 163,700 people in New Hampshire who voted for that man?