Ex-President Donald Trump easily outpolled former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, further consolidating his grip on the Republican presidential nomination.

As we prepare to post, the networks have called the contest for Trump, but the precise margin of victory remains to be determined, although it appears it will be more than 10 percentage points.

Trump’s win in New Hampshire comes eight days after his blowout victory in the Iowa caucuses, where he received 51 percent of the vote, more than the combined votes of the second-place finisher, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Haley, who finished third. DeSantis pulled out of the race on Sunday and announced his endorsement of Trump. The results in New Hampshire, the first Republican primary election, could spell the end of Haley’s campaign as well, even before the next primary, set for South Carolina on February 24.

This would wrap up the Republican primary contest at the earliest date ever. Trump is an ex-president who was defeated in his reelection bid by a substantial margin and then sought to overthrow the results by means of a fascist attack on the Capitol. He has been criminally indicted on 91 counts. The fact that he will likely be the Republican presidential candidate in the November election, with a good chance of winning, testifies to the unprecedented crisis and breakdown of American democracy.

It is an indictment not only of the Republican Party, well advanced in its transformation into a fascist party, but of the entire two-party system. The chief political responsibility for the revival of Trump’s fortunes rests with the Biden administration and the Democrats. Both in the run-up to and aftermath of Trump’s nearly-successful coup of January 6, 2021, they have sought to conceal from the American people the complicity of the Republican leadership as a whole and significant sections of the military, intelligence and state apparatus in Trump’s bid for dictatorship.

Their overriding concern from the outset has been to rescue the Republican Party, preferably under a new leadership, in order to carry out the plans of American imperialism for war against Russia, Iran and China and bolster the two-party system as the framework for massive attacks on the democratic and social rights of the working class at home.

Trump’s victories by no means represent a mass popular mandate for his fascistic policies. Only 15 percent of registered Republicans turned out in Iowa, and Trump’s “landslide” consisted of 56,250 votes and comprised only 2.7 percent of the state’s registered voters.

In New Hampshire, some 320,000 voters participated in the GOP primary, or 29 percent of the voting-eligible population of 1.1 million. New Hampshire primaries are unusual in that both undeclared voters—those who remain outside the two main bourgeois parties—and voters registered with the party holding the primary can cast ballots. Haley hoped to win a decisive majority of undeclared voters to overcome or at least significantly compensate for the expected wide margin for Trump among registered Republicans, and on that basis either achieve an upset win or come away with a more narrow than expected loss, and thereby revive her campaign.

Even before the New Hampshire vote, Republican officials were flocking to endorse Trump. On Monday night, Trump was joined at his final campaign event in the state by three former challengers who had dropped out of the race: South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (who was appointed to his Senate seat by then-Governor Haley in 2013), billionaire businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (also a billionaire).

There has been no serious discussion in the corporate media of the actual policies being advanced by both Trump and his Republican challengers. Trump and Haley have both focused much of their agitation on savage attacks on immigrants and demands for mass deportations and detentions of refugees. On social policy, Haley has gone even further than Trump, calling for the raising of the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare. Her main criticism of Trump is his failure to commit to unlimited military aid to Ukraine, which has gained for her campaign the open sympathy of Democratic-aligned media outlets and a faction of the corporate-financial oligarchy that has long dominated American politics. There are no differences on the ongoing US/Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Trump’s ascendance in the GOP and his gains in the polls do not reflect mass popular support for dictatorship. Rather, they are the result of the rightward lurch of the Democratic Party and the entire capitalist political establishment. The working class is broadly moving to the left, as seen in the spread of militant strikes and struggles against layoffs, staggering levels of social inequality, falling living standards, and attacks on democratic rights. Millions of young workers and students, in particular, are protesting against the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, carried out with the full support and direct collaboration of US imperialism and its imperialist allies.

There is no democratic or progressive faction of the ruling class, and no outlet in the arena of electoral politics for the real sentiments and demands of the working class. Instead, the supposed liberal and left parties and politicians, including pseudo-left appendages of the Democratic Party such as the Democratic Socialists of America, increasingly adapt to or adopt the anti-democratic policies of the far-right—against immigrants, against anti-genocide protesters—and thus help build up the most right-wing political forces. Hence the rise of the far-right in the electoral arena.

The war-mongering and anti-democratic policies of Biden and the Democrats were on full display on Tuesday, even as New Hampshire voters were going to the polls. The Democratic Party-aligned Washington Post, owned by Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos (net worth $177.56 billion) published an editorial supporting Haley against Trump on the grounds that she supports war against the “unholy alliance” of Russia, China and Iran, while Trump “looks inward, consumed by grievances.”

The Post continued:

Ms. Haley has belatedly criticized Mr. Trump in recent days for cozying up to dictators, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. A second Trump term would make the United States decidedly less safe, as he degraded alliances with America’s friends and played into the hands of the country’s adversaries.

The daily White House press briefing was dominated by declarations from National Security Council spokesman John Kirby of further strikes against Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen and affirmations of Washington’s commitment to “make sure our two partners (Ukraine and Israel) have what they need to defend themselves.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly praised the “bipartisan” negotiations in the Senate for a deal to fix the “broken immigration system” by restricting the right to asylum and expanding deportations in exchange for the $60.1 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine included in Biden’s supplemental funding request.

Also on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that nine Democratic governors, headed up by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, had sent a letter to Biden and Congress demanding more drastic measures to halt the movement of refugees into the US.

At least 14 anti-Gaza war protesters were removed from a Biden campaign event in Manassas, Virginia marking the 51st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. They were dragged out when they repeatedly interrupted Biden’s remarks with chants denouncing the US/Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.

These developments underscore the fact that the drive to world war and fascism cannot be stopped within the framework of the capitalist two-party system. The growing movement of the working class in the US and internationally must take the form of an independent political struggle against the source of genocide, war and dictatorship—the capitalist system—and a conscious fight for socialism.