by It was a moment for Donald Trump to be gracious, magnanimous, maybe even presidential. Instead he turned away on his opponent’s clothes. “When I looked at her in the probably not so bad fancy dress, I said, ‘What is she doing? We won,’” he said of rival Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday night.
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Trump had just won the first primary election in 2024 and had just conceded the Republican nomination for president of the United States. Party leaders and campaign centers are now eager to dismiss Haley as irrelevant, move on from the primary and unite against the Democrats. They want Trump to face an almost inevitable rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.
But the 77-year-old is still consumed with rage over Haley’s reluctance to drop out of the race. Her petulance is a reminder of the unhinged behavior that turned off independent voters in New Hampshire and could be a liability in a one-on-one contest with Biden. It is also at odds with an unusually professional and disciplined campaign operation.
Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Donald Trump wants the race to be over and we see evidence of why that is important to the Trump campaign from his speech, which was a train wreck to basic and displayed. all the worst tendencies of Donald Trump. It was an undisciplined Trump and that’s what pisses off independent voters.”
She said: “This is the achilles heel of the Trump campaign and they know it. As soon as this is stopped he has no more of those impromptu speeches at night. Their concern is not that they are not going to win the nomination; their concern is the damage Trump will do to independent voters in the general election.
Trump’s investment of emotion and energy in attacking Haley is wildly out of proportion to the minimal threat Haley poses. He won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide – she came in third – and hit double digits in New Hampshire. No other Republican candidate in history has won the first two contests to win his party’s nomination. It looks like the next five months of primaries will be irrelevant to his leadership.
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives and former presidential candidate, said: “Trump’s best strategy is to assume he is the nominee and go straight to Biden and ignore Haley, let her languish until she runs out of money or realizes. there is no future. She will leave right now.”
Republicans have rallied around the former president, pressuring Haley to step aside. She is not competing in the Nevada caucuses next month. Trump has received endorsements from most of South Carolina’s leading Republicans and polls show him leading in the state, which has a strong evangelical Christian base, ahead of the February 24 primary. .
But Haley, 52, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, is soldiering on. She tweeted on Thursday: “Don’t disrespect me, that’s always fun.” Next week she is scheduled for a fundraising tour that includes stops in New York, Florida, California, Texas and South Carolina. It is expected that she will continue to attract the support of donors and Never Trumpers within the party in a final stand and hopes that the 91 criminal charges against him could still be dismissed.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I know some of her donors and I think they want her to stay there to promote Trump. They don’t put it on the record but they think there’s a reasonable chance that something will happen to Trump, health-wise or incriminate him to the point that he can no longer be the nominee.”
Haley describes herself as “scrappy,” continues to hold rallies and is increasingly aggressive in her denunciation of Trump. On Wednesday she launched a $4m South Carolina ad campaign describing the prospect of a Biden v Trump election as “a rematch that nobody wants”. The narrator says: “Biden – too old. Trump – too much chaos. There is a better choice for a better America.”
How long will she last? Michael Steele, a Trump critic and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “My bet is two weeks. You want to go into that race in your home state and lose 30 or 40 points? Where is the political viability after that? We’ve seen candidates run actual general election presidential campaigns and lose their home state and never hear from them again.”
Haley’s stubbornness angered Trump. He has branded her “bird brain”. He threatened to blacklist anyone who donates to his campaign. He has often railed against her on social media, writing: “Can someone please explain to Nikki that she lost – and lost badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week. They were, as some fake media say, ‘CRUSHING DEFATS.’”
The insults and outbursts are a reminder of why Trump alienated moderate voters in the past. While his victory in New Hampshire was historic, it also exposed general election vulnerabilities, showing that he was popular among Republicans but unpopular among independents, who were allowed to participate in the Republican primary under state rules.
The gap between the Republican vote and the independent vote has never been so wide in a Republican primary in New Hampshire. According to a CNN poll, Trump won Republican voters 74% to 25%, but Haley won independents 58% to 39%.
Forty-two percent of voters said they would not think Trump would be fit for office if convicted of a crime. A Fox News analysis found that 35% of voters in New Hampshire would be so dissatisfied with Trump’s nomination that they would not vote for him in November.
There has been much more weakness than strength coming out of the Republican party in the last few weeks
Simon Rosenberg’s democratic strategies
Steele, host of cable news network MSNBC, said: “There are 91 indictments hanging on this man. Of course he’s vulnerable but everyone wants to push him up like he’s a tiger or some lion. It’s just ridiculous.
“I want people to be honest about what they’re facing. This guy is vulnerable as hell. He is weak as hell. But in reality on TV, he’s the guy who fires people: he’s rough, he’s tough, he has a mind. No, he’s a strange little boy who shows that petulance when challenged.”
The Biden campaign is working on the premise that Trump is the nominee. He has given two major speeches about Trump’s threat to democracy and the dangerous rise of white supremacy. This week he held a joint event with his vice president, Kamala Harris, in Virginia to promote reproductive freedom, highlighting Trump’s role in the supreme court’s Dobbs decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Dobbs decision was basically this before-and-after moment in American politics when the realization came that the Republican party had become too ugly, too big, too dangerous, and there was he is struggling. very much in election after election from the spring of 2022.”
He said: “You’re starting to see, even this early, that there’s a lot more weakness than strength coming out of the Republican party in the last few weeks. It’s about Maga [Make America great again] has become unattractive even to Republican voters. Fear and opposition to Magic is the most powerful force in American politicss. That’s why Republicans keep losing, and Republicans have chosen an ultra-Maga candidate to be their nominee in 2024.”
