Former President Donald Trump escalated his attacks against former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as he tries to prevent her from outperforming him in next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
Trump, in particular, took Haley to task for appealing to New Hampshire’s many undeclared or independent voters, claiming, incorrectly, they are attempting to “infiltrate” the 2024 GOP presidential primary.
During his almost hourlong rally in Atkinson Tuesday, one day after he broke election records by dominating Iowa’s opening nominating contest with 51% of the vote, Trump criticized Haley for her “inappropriate,” “bad for unity” speech after she came in third behind Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
“We really got to get back onto Biden and beating the Democrats and not wasting a lot of time with these [candidates],” he said.
While encouraging New Hampshire voters not to be complacent, Trump also scrutinized Haley for her entitlement reform policies and for continuing to underscore a Wall Street Journal poll, which found last month she had a 17 percentage point advantage over President Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, compared to the former president’s 4 point edge.
“We’re beating her by many, many, many points in South Carolina. The governor of South Carolina and she’s losing by 50 points. It’s not a good sign,” Trump said of the former governor.
“I moved her to the United Nations,” he added. “Honestly, she was not a good negotiator. She was not a good negotiator. Now she likes to talk about, ‘When I negotiated with China.’ I negotiated with China.”
Trump averages 43.5% support in New Hampshire to Haley’s 29%, according to RealClearPolitics. In South Carolina, Trump averages 52% and Haley 22%.
Before testing another nickname, “Nikki New Tax,” Trump, who was in a New York state court earlier Tuesday for his civil lawsuit against E. Jean Carroll, undercut billionaire businessman Charles Koch for spending “a lot of his inherited money on elections,” including on Haley. Trump similarly did not spare Biden, alleging that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy once told him Biden was the “dumbest” person in the Senate, in addition to Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH) for endorsing Haley and exploring a presidential campaign himself.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who himself endorsed Trump in Iowa this week, was with the former president in New Hampshire, warning the country is “in the middle of a war” between “the permanent state and the everyday citizen,” “between those of us who love the United States of America and a minority who hates this country and what we stand for.”
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“This man is going to get in there this time around and actually shut down … that deep state,” Ramaswamy said in urging for election integrity reforms. “The way we’re actually going to do this in the long run and win this time around is with elections.”
