With Ron DeSantis suspending his presidential campaign on Sunday, Nikki Haley gets the one-on-one match-up with Donald Trump for which she’s been longing.
“At one point in this campaign, there were 14 of us running,” she says in an email fundraising pitch, sent out shortly after the DeSantis news broke.
“But today, it’s officially a two-person race between me and Donald Trump!”
Haley’s showdown with Trump in the state-by-state contest to choose a Republican presidential candidate may not turn out exactly as she hoped, however. The way the 14-person field has thinned of late has played out mostly to the former president’s advantage.
The day after Trump’s win in Iowa, another presidential rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, withdrew from the race and endorsed Trump, giving him an extra round of headlines.
Now DeSantis is out of the picture, as well. Like Ramaswamy, he has endorsed Trump, although with a bit less fervour. The Florida governor reserved most of his passion for Haley – and not in a good way.
He called the former US ambassador to the UN part of “the old Republican guard of yesteryear – a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism”. It was a line of attack – Haley the elite-loving globalist – that has been the centrerpiece of Trump’s attack on his former Cabinet member over the past few days.
Trump’s age and confusion
The state has a higher number of college graduates in its population, 37%, which is one of Haley’s strongest demographics.
Haley is leaning into Trump’s verbal miscues as she seeks a game-changing moment ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, where her campaign desperately needs a strong result.
She pounced Sunday on Trump’s apparent confusing days earlier of she and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during his own campaign event.
“Trump goes on and on, multiple times, saying that I prevented the security on January 6 at the Capitol. I wasn’t even anywhere near the Capitol. I wasn’t in office,” Haley told a crowd Sunday in Derry, N.H.
“The reality is that he was confused. He was confused the same way that Joe Biden was going to start World War II. He was confused the same way that he said he ran against President Obama.”
Trump appeared to confuse Pelosi, who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob of pro-Trump supporters angry over the election forced the evacuation of lawmakers, and Haley, a former South Carolina governor who was not in Washington that day and has not served in Congress.
Trump in the past has also appeared to confuse Biden with Obama in various statements.
Haley, 52, has made generational change a calling-card of her presidential campaign as she takes on Trump, who is 77, in the GOP primary and eyes a general-election battle against President Biden, who is 81.
“Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?” she rhetorically asked a crowd of New Hampshire voters in Derry. “No!” . People in the crowd yelled back.
Trump has largely skirted scrutiny about his age and verbal errors even as Biden has been put under the microscope over whether his age and mental
Matthew Bartlett, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist, said Trump’s cognitive stance could be a fruitful line of attack for Haley.
“As much as the GOP has concerns about Biden, his age, and his competency, there are now whispers about Trump’s,” Bartlett said. “More people are wondering why did didn’t debate and some of his performances, including this very odd apparent senior moment, have people talking.”
“It is hard to set a trap for Trump, but he has a tendency to set one for himself – and then walk right into it,” he continued. “Even those that love him will admit he is his own worst enemy and often talks his way into trouble – legally and on the campaign trail too.”
News Agencies
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.