Nikki Haley now says Donald Trump is too old, too confused, too chaotic, and too tantrum-prone to be president — and in a jab likely to especially infuriate her rival, warns he even lacks the money to mount a proper White House run.
The former South Carolina governor — the former president’s last opponent standing in the GOP nominating race — is turning up the heat as she battles to prevent a career-besmirching shellacking in her home state primary.
Haley laid out a stinging character study of the former president in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday.
Grouping Trump with President Joe Biden, she said it was “absurd” that the country would be stuck with two 80-year-old candidates. (Biden is 81 and Trump is 77.) She warned that Trump has had some “confused moments” in recent days, and she rebuked the ex-president for a “temper tantrum” on the night of his New Hampshire primary win when he tried to push her out of the race. In recent campaign events, Haley has also questioned Trump’s morality and capacity to tell right from wrong.
Her harsh turn against the boss she once served as US ambassador to the United Nations begs the question of why, after months of dancing around Trump’s character issues, legal quagmire and assault on democracy, she’s finally getting tough.
Has Haley found her voice, located a sweet spot where she can target the former president or decided to commit to a new hardline strategy that she thinks might bring down the overwhelming favorite for his third straight nomination?
Or is Haley simply joining the long and inglorious tradition of Republican candidates who lash out at Trump only when they’ve already been effectively crushed by him, including the unhappy Florida trio of former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016 and current Gov. Ron DeSantis at the end of his misfiring 2024 race? DeSantis struggled with how to deal with Trump for his entire campaign and he only let loose with searing attacks against his former mentor when his cause already seemed hopeless ahead of his second place finish in Iowa last month.
DeSantis criticized Trump for not showing up to debates and claimed that the conservative media acted as a “Praetorian guard” to protect him. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you are wonderful,” DeSantis said. Ironically, the comments by DeSantis directly predicted how the ex-president behaved toward him when DeSantis pulled out and promptly endorsed a man who had subjected him to the cruelest of character attacks for months.
Haley is insisting that her campaign is, unlike that of DeSantis, built for a prolonged delegate fight against Trump and is pledging to stay in the race long after her home state’s Republican primary on February 24.
“Why is the political elite pushing us to name a nominee when only two states have voted? There are 48 states and more territories that haven’t voted. In the delegate count you need 1,215 delegates. Donald Trump has 32. I have 17. Why would we stop now?” Haley asked a crowd in Hilton Head on Thursday.
Haley goes after Trump — up to a point
Haley, while noticeably sharpening her tone, has not adopted the full-on, point of no return attacks on Trump over his perceived unfitness for office or his assault on democracy like those fired off by her former Republican primary rival Chris Christie or from ex-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. Such rhetoric offers a fast one-way ticket out of Republican politics and there’s no sign yet Haley wants to risk any future presidential prospects, assuming that she doesn’t pull off a massive upset this year.
But taking on Trump directly is risky. Few Republicans emerge unscathed from a direct confrontation with the former president given his extraordinary hold over the party’s base voters and acidic tongue. The plain truth is that Trump is willing and able to hit far lower than any candidate who attacks him. But can Haley, in a losing cause, draw a line that will allow her to tell voters in a future presidential race that she predicted an eventual Trump loss to Biden or his chaotic and lawless second term? Or will her new willingness to face down the ex-president so enrage him and alienate his supporters that she hurts her future viability?
Haley took her critique of Trump to a new level Thursday in the interview with Tapper, driving home an attack that she’s been honing in South Carolina in recent days. She pounced on new filings that showed that two of the ex-president’s political action committees had spent nearly $29 million on his legal fees during the last six months of 2023 as he faces multiple criminal and civil trials. The New York Times, meanwhile, first reported that the Trump PACs’ legal spending was expected to total roughly $50 million for the year.
“Get ready to spend more campaign dollars on legal fees, because those court cases have just started. He’s got two in March and they go out for the rest of the year,” Haley said on “The Lead.” She added: “It is unconscionable to me that a candidate would spend $50 million in legal fees. It explains why he’s not doing many rallies. He doesn’t have the money to do it.” Earlier, in an event in Columbia, South Carolina, Haley asked an audience: “Do you really think he is going to win against Joe Biden when he is spending that much on legal fees? He is not.”
Haley’s mention of money may anger Trump more than just about any other insult since he’s used his great wealth as a tool to build his mythology as a great businessman and it appears central to his self-image. But the former president may well have money problems coming down the track that at least will test his store of ready cash and could force him to sell or mortgage some real estate assets.
In addition to his steep legal fees, a New York jury last week said Trump should pay $83.3 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for defamation after he was found liable in an earlier civil trial of sexually assaulting her. The former president is also braced for the outcome of a New York civil fraud trial against him, his organization and his adult sons that could see him ordered to pay several hundreds of millions of dollars in disgorgement – or over ill-gotten gains. Trump may also be barred from doing business in the state of New York, a move that could prove hugely damaging to his real estate empire.
Given the financial clouds swirling around Trump — not to mention the four pending criminal trials he faces — Haley’s comments about money are likely to cut deep.
Yet the former UN ambassador also showed in her comments that she’s still holding back and is not willing to unleash the kind of direct attack on Trump that would inevitably damage her future prospects in a party transformed in his image.
She said in Columbia that she hadn’t “paid attention to his court cases. I don’t know where he’s innocent where he’s guilty or what’s happened.” Given that Haley is running against Trump and his legal exposure is his greatest liability in a general election, it might be incumbent on Haley to consider the mountain of charges and evidence against her rival. Considering that women voters are likely to play a critical role in the general election, another candidate might have brought up Trump’s alleged behavior toward Carroll. Especially one trying to break the highest glass ceiling to become the first woman president.
The closest that Haley has come to discussing the details of the case was when she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I absolutely trust the jury.” Similarly, Haley has been unwilling to go delve deeply into Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud and the ransacking of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For months on the campaign trail she alluded to Trump’s past behavior obliquely, arguing that it was time for a new generation of leadership to move the country on. And she finally arrived at this dodge: “I was proud to serve in his administration. I agree with a lot of his policies, but rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Haley added at a rally in New Hampshire last month, “You know I’m right. Chaos follows him,” drawing applause from her supporters.
Republicans don’t like it when rivals speak ill of Trump
But Haley’s tentative way of referring to the pandemonium of the Trump presidency almost suggests that the former commander in chief had no agency in creating the mayhem of the worst attack on American democracy in modern times.
But she had little choice. This was a message designed to navigate Haley past a critical reality of the GOP nominating race — there is no advantage to be won among core GOP primary voters from hammering Trump or truth-telling about his record.
The findings of a new CNN/SSRS poll released on Thursday encapsulated Haley’s dilemma. While it showed her beating Biden in a hypothetical general election matchup by 13 points among registered voters, the poll found that 70% of Republicans had a preference for Trump and only 19% preferred her as their nominee. Haley’s performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, where she did well among moderate, suburban Republicans and independents but struggled with hard-core Republicans tell the story of the former president’s dominance in the nomination race. These figures explain why Haley — and GOP rivals like DeSantis were in such a vise over the last year. They had to find a way to exploit Trump’s greatest general election liabilities in the knowledge that most Republican voters had no interest in hearing about them.
Trump’s campaign is increasing its counter-attacks on Haley, hoping that a crushing victory in South Carolina will end her White House bid. On Thursday, a group of state lawmakers who have endorsed the ex-president held two news conferences designed to destroy her reputation among GOP voters in her home state. South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace accused Haley of being pro-China. “We need a man who’s going to be strong and whose enemies will fear him. Nikki Haley is China’s favorite governor,” Mace, herself a former critic of Trump, said. South Carolina state Rep. Bill Taylor hit back at some of Haley’s recent criticisms that Trump only thinks of himself. “Nikki Haley is not the right candidate to be president of the United States. Nikki is always about Nikki,” Taylor said.
While it’s theoretically possible that Haley’s new truth telling — up to a point — about Trump as well as the former president’s very public legal crises could begin to turn sentiment against him in the primary, there’s more reason to suspect that it will not. And Haley seems destined to join the ranks of Republican candidates who were willing to call out Trump’s character and conduct — only when it was too late.
