It was a moment when Donald Trump could be gracious, magnanimous and perhaps even presidential. Instead, he lashed out at his opponent’s clothing. “When I saw her in the fancy dress, which probably wasn’t that fancy, I said, ‘What is she doing? We won,” he said of New Hampshire rival Nikki Haley on Tuesday night.
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Trump had just won the first primaries of 2024 and all but clinched the Republican nomination for the US presidency. Party leaders and campaign surrogates are now eager to banish Haley to irrelevance, abandon the primaries and unite against the Democrats. They want Trump to move on to an almost inevitable rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.
Still, the 77-year-old remains consumed with anger over Haley’s unwillingness to leave the race. His irritability is a reminder of the unhinged behavior that turned off independent voters in New Hampshire and could prove a problem in a head-to-head battle with Biden. It is also at odds with what is 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 over and we see evidence of why that matters to the Trump campaign from his speech, which was essentially a train wreck and showcased all of Donald Trump’s worst tendencies. It was an undisciplined Trump and this is what turns off independent voters.”
She added: “This is the Achilles heel of the Trump campaign and they know it. The sooner this is completed, the sooner he won’t have to deal with any of those impromptu late-night speeches. Their concern isn’t that they won’t win the nomination; their concern is the damage Trump will do if he has to respond to Haley in the general election with independent voters.”
Trump’s investment in emotion and energy in attacking Haley is vastly out of proportion compared to the minimal threat Haley poses. He won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide — she came third — and beat her by double digits in New Hampshire. No other Republican candidate in history who won the first two elections has failed to win his party’s nomination. His dominance appears to make the next five months of primaries irrelevant.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and ex-presidential candidate, said: “Trump’s best strategy is to assume he’s the nominee and go straight for Biden and ignore Haley, letting her flounder until she either runs out of money or realizes there is no future. She will disappear soon.”
Republicans have rallied around the former president and are putting pressure on Haley to step aside. She is not running in next month’s Nevada caucuses. Trump has won support from most of South Carolina’s leading Republicans and polls show him with a large lead in the state, which has a strong base of Christian evangelicals, ahead of the Feb. 24 primary.
Yet 52-year-old Haley, former governor of South Carolina and American ambassador to the UN, continues. She tweeted on Thursday: “Underestimate me, that’s always fun.” Next week she is scheduled for a fundraising tour with stops in New York, Florida, California, Texas and South Carolina. She is expected to continue to draw support from donors as Never Trumpers within the party make a last stand and hope that the 91 criminal charges against him can still derail him.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I know some of her donors and I suspect they want her to stay to test Trump. They don’t put it in writing, but they think there is a reasonable chance that something will happen to Trump, either health-wise or because of the belief that he can no longer be the nominee.”
Haley describes herself as “sloppy,” continues to hold rallies and becomes more aggressive in her denunciations of Trump. On Wednesday, she launched a $4 million advertising campaign in South Carolina, describing the prospect of a Biden-Trump election as “a rematch that no one wants.” The narrator says, “Biden – too old. Trump – too much chaos. There is a better choice for a better America.”
How long can she hold out? Michael Steele, a Trump critic and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “My bet is two weeks. Do you really want to take that race in your home state and lose by 30 or 40 points? Where is the political viability after that? We’ve seen candidates run actual general election campaigns and lose their home states, and we’ve never heard from them again.”
Haley’s persistence has infuriated Trump. He branded her ‘bird brain’. He has threatened to blacklist anyone who donates to her campaign. He has regularly railed against her on social media, writing: “Can someone please explain to Nikki that she has lost – and lost badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week. They were, as some non-fake media say, ‘CRUSHING defeats.’”
The insults and outbursts remind us why Trump has alienated moderate voters in the past. While his victory in New Hampshire was historic, it also exposed vulnerabilities in the general election, showing him to be deeply popular with Republicans but deeply unpopular with independents, who were allowed to run under state rules. Republican primaries.
There has never been such a wide gap between the Republican vote and the independent vote in a Republican primary in New Hampshire. According to CNN exit polls, Trump won Republican voters 74% to 25%, but Haley won independent voters 58% to 39%.
Forty-two percent of voters said they would not consider Trump fit for office if he were convicted of a crime. A Fox News analysis found that 35% of New Hampshire voters would be so dissatisfied with a Trump nomination that they would not vote for him in November.
There has been far more weakness than strength coming out of the Republican Party in recent weeks
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg
Steele, host of the MSNBC cable news network, added: “There are 91 charges hanging over this man. Of course he’s vulnerable, but everyone wants to keep blowing him up like he’s a tiger or a lion. It’s just ridiculous.
“I just wish people would be honest about what awaits them. This man is vulnerable as hell. He’s weak as hell. But in reality TV land, he’s the guy who gets people fired: he’s rough, he’s tough, he’s determined. No, he’s a petulant little boy who shows that irritability when challenged.
Biden’s campaign assumes Trump will be the nominee. He has given two major speeches on the threat Trump poses to democracy and the dangerous rise of white supremacy. This week, he and his vice president, Kamala Harris, held an event in Virginia to promote reproductive freedom, highlighting Trump’s role in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which struck down the constitutional right to abortion.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Dobbs decision essentially became this before-and-after moment in American politics, where there was just a sense that the Republican Party had become too ugly, too extreme and too dangerous and there had difficulty with since the spring of 2022, strongly in election after election.”
He added: “You’re starting to see that, even early on, there’s a lot more weakness than strength that has come out of the Republican Party in recent weeks. It’s because Maga [Make America great again] has become unattractive even to Republican voters. Fear and resistance to Maga are the most powerful forces in American politicsS. That is why the Republicans keep losing, and the Republicans have chosen an ultra-Maga candidate as their candidate in 2024.”