Former President Trump and his allies are ramping up attacks on Nikki Haley, seeking to squash any momentum she has in the primary race with the Iowa caucuses less than a week away and snuff out any chatter that she could join Trump on the ticket as his vice president.
Trump has increasingly been willing to attack Haley after focusing his attention elsewhere for much of 2023. His campaign apparatus has also targeted the former ambassador to the United Nations with attack ads as she rises in the polls.
Numerous Trump allies have in recent days blitzed Haley — whom they view as insufficiently loyal to Trump and the MAGA agenda — amid speculation she could be on a short list of potential running mates, should Trump clinch the nomination.
“I don’t see any world where we still need oxygen that Nikki Haley is asked to be the vice president,” Sean Spicer, a former Trump White House press secretary, told The Hill. “I don’t think she wants it, I don’t think he wants her, and I think there’s a lot of other options that make a lot more sense.”
“I think the reason they are doing what they are doing is … this all comes down to his margin of victory,” Spicer added. “If Trump can win decisively in Iowa and New Hampshire, I think, for all intents and purposes, the race is over.”
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC, claimed in a statement Haley “disqualified herself” from winning the GOP nomination when she said during a CNN town hall last week there were some criminal indictments Trump “is going to have to answer for.”
“Haley thinks that President Trump might be a criminal, but not the illegals invading this nation,” Leavitt said.
Polling from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ shows Haley has steadily climbed since the first GOP debate in August. She has narrowly pulled into second place in an average of national polls. An average of Iowa polls shows Haley within 1 percentage point of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for second place, though Haley trails Trump by a wide margin in both cases.
Perhaps Haley’s best chance to shake up the race is in New Hampshire, where polling shows her within 12 percentage points of Trump’s lead and gaining ground in recent weeks.
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With Haley emerging as perhaps Trump’s biggest obstacle to clinching the GOP nomination, the former president and his team have turned up the heat on his former Cabinet official.
Trump, who has taken to calling Haley “Birdbrain” in social media posts, attacked the former South Carolina governor multiple times at rallies in Iowa over the weekend.
“Nikki Haley has been in the pocket of the open borders establishment donors her entire career,” Trump said at one event. “She’s a globalist.”
Trump at one point mocked Haley’s pledge not to run against him in 2024, only for her to reverse course and enter the primary after Trump already declared his candidacy.
The Trump campaign has shifted the focus of its daily “Kiss of Death” attack emails from targeting DeSantis to going after Haley. Recent email blasts have hammered Haley over past comments and positions on immigration and tax policy while she was governor.
Both the campaign and MAGA Inc., a super PAC aligned with Trump’s reelection bid, have unveiled ads in recent days hitting Haley on immigration. The super PAC ad includes a clip of Haley saying those who entered the country illegally should not be talked about as criminals, and it accuses her of opposing the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Haley campaign pushed back on the super PAC ad, suggesting its claims had been taken out of context and were not representative of her record.
“When Donald Trump was still a Hillary Clinton-supporting liberal, Nikki Haley passed one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the country,” Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik said in a statement. “This is clearly a two-person race between Trump’s debunked lies and Nikki’s vision for a strong and proud America.”
More broadly, the Haley campaign has tried to frame Trump’s increasing focus on her as a clear indication of her strength in the primary. Her team believes she is in the strongest position to assemble a coalition of voters that could defeat Trump, particularly in the more purple state of New Hampshire.
“Someone’s getting nervous,” Haley wrote on social media in December in response to a Trump super PAC ad attacking her.
Still, Haley’s criticisms of Trump have largely been about the need for a new generation of leadership and the chaos and division that follows him. While Republican sources have said that is likely a strategic move to avoid alienating Trump supporters she may need to win over, some of her rivals have taken it as a sign she is angling for a spot on the ticket should Trump become the nominee.
Haley herself has said in multiple interviews that she doesn’t “play for second” and is not running to be vice president. But she has also declined to definitively say she would not join a ticket as vice president, suggesting it would only take away attention from her campaign.
Some Republicans, such as former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have floated Haley’s name as a potential running mate for Trump, arguing she balances out his weaknesses with voters.
Multiple news outlets reported in December that Trump had asked for feedback about the possibility of Haley as his running mate. A source in Trump’s orbit told The Hill he was likely just quizzing advisers on the possibility and not formally suggesting she was a top choice.
Other Trump allies have moved to squash the idea of a Trump-Haley ticket.
Donald Trump Jr. told Newsmax in late December he would go to “great lengths” to ensure Haley isn’t his father’s running mate.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), who has expressed interest in being Trump’s vice president and is considered a top contender for the job, said in recent days it would be a mistake for Trump to pick Haley.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief White House strategist and host of the “War Room” podcast, said it would cause a “big fight” if there were a push to put Haley on the ticket with Trump.
“They’ll say Trump needs a woman — Nikki — on the ticket. She balances things, and she can bring together that 15 percent of Never Trumpers in the Republican Party,” Bannon said in a recent podcast interview. “We’re going to have to have that fight.”