Donald Trump supercharged his hostile takeover of the Republican Party on Super Tuesday, scoring big wins in at least seven states as he threatened to break away from his GOP rivals in the delegate chase.

Ted Cruz kept hold of his home state of Texas and won neighboring Oklahoma as well as Alaska. And Marco Rubio saved his campaign from a dispiriting disaster, as he carried Minnesota’s caucuses for his first win on an otherwise brutal night.


But the story of the day — and of 2016 — was Trump, as the Manhattan mogul sidestepped charges of racism after he failed to immediately denounce the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview over the weekend. He steamrolled across the country, winning states as diverse and distant as Alabama, Virginia and Massachusetts.

He’s now won in the South. He’s won in the West. He’s won in the Northeast.

And, as Trump has throughout, he gleefully violated every rule of politics as he bypassed the usual victory speech and instead held court for a nationally televised, presidential-style press conference at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida. All the cable networks carried it live.

"This has been an amazing evening," Trump declared, as his most prized endorser, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie stood by his side, staring blankly into the distance.

Trump quickly dismissed his GOP rivals. Of Cruz’s home-state win, he said, "I know how hard he worked, actually.” And he called Rubio a “little senator,” with the analysis of “he had a tough night."

The real estate mogul clearly looked ahead to a contest with Hillary Clinton. "Making America great again will be better than making America whole again,” he said, mocking the slogan she pushed in her own victory speech on Tuesday night.

"I'm a conservative,” Trump added, “but I'm a common-sense conservative.”

Super Tuesday represented the biggest delegate haul of the 2016 nominating contest with a total of 595 delegates — nearly half those needed to secure the nomination — were up for grabs across a dozen states.

And as Trump expanded his lead, mainstream Republicans fretted about whether their fractured field, even if it consolidated quickly, could catch him.

Trump’s rash of victories on Super Tuesday gave extra urgency to the anti-Trump forces within the GOP. Some of the GOP’s top financiers — Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts, and New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer — gathered on a conference call Tuesday evening to discuss next steps.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who last week joked about murdering Cruz on the Senate floor, suggested the Texas senator may be the party’s last, best hope to defeat Trump. “We may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Donald Trump. And I'm not so sure that would work,” Graham said on CBS Tuesday evening.

In a sign of Rubio’s rough night, he was flirting with failing to meet the 20 percent threshold to win delegates in several key states, including Alabama, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont.

Cruz looked to push Rubio out of the race entirely in his speech in Stafford, Texas. “Tomorrow morning we have a choice,” he said. "So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the nomination remains more likely, and that would be a disaster for Republicans, conservatives, and for the nation.”

Cruz called his "the only campaign that has beat, that can beat and that will beat Donald Trump.” (He delivered his speech before Minnesota was declared for Rubio.)

Cruz added, “I ask for you to prayerfully consider coming together. Uniting.”

Rubio has vowed to remain in the race until his home state of Florida votes in two weeks, on March 15. But Trump holds a big lead in polling there.

“Florida, I know you’re ready,” Rubio said on Tuesday night after his string of defeats became clear. “The pundits say we’re underdogs, I’ll accept that. We’ve all been underdogs. This is a community of underdogs. This is a state of underdogs. This is a country of underdogs, but we will win.”

Trump’s victories in the South — winning Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama easily — on Tuesday were particularly bad news for Cruz, who has called Super Tuesday “the single most important day in the entire Republican primary.”

The slate of southern states that voted — heavily populated with conservative and evangelical Christians — were supposed to be Cruz’s bulwark but Trump carried evangelicals over Cruz by wide margins in many places, leading by 25 percent in Alabama, 19 percent in Tennessee and 15 percent in Georgia, according to exit polls.

Cruz did carry Texas by a decisive margin — which he had declared a must-win — and finished a clear first in next door Oklahoma, as well. In Alaska, he took 36 percent to Trump's 33.5 percent.

The Republican race had devolved into an insult-hurling affair ahead of Super Tuesday. Cruz likened Trump to “P.T. Barnum” and the “dancing bears” of the circus. Trump mercilessly mocked “little Marco.” And Rubio whacked Trump for his alleged spray tan, suggested had Trump urinated on himself in the last debate and teased him for the size of his hands.

Those barbs netted Rubio live cable news coverage of his rallies for the first time, as he has sought to redefine Trump as a “con artist.” But it didn’t pay off at the polls Tuesday.

Ben Carson, who has become a bit player in the campaign, called for a cease-fire, asking his four remaining opponents to gather for a summit ahead of the next debate, on Thursday in Detroit, to “not succumb to the media’s desire for a fight on the stage.” The retired neurosurgeon said Tuesday night that he was not dropping out and that politicians have woven a complicated web. “It will be very, very difficult to untangle it. But I’m not ready to try to quit untangling it yet,” he said.

Kasich continued his campaign, essentially bypassing the big delegate haul of Super Tuesday and banking on his home state of Ohio in mid-March, even though it would not bring him anywhere close to Trump’s delegate lead.

Rubio had tried to cast Cruz as a failure even before the polls closed. “Tonight was supposed to be Ted Cruz's big night,” Rubio told reporters in Minnesota. “I mean, his whole campaign was built on his Super Tuesday strategy.”

“If you can't sweep up Super Tuesday, where in this country are you going to have a big showing?” Rubio said of Cruz, though the sentiment could easily be applied to his own candidacy.