Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said she thinks President Biden is “more dangerous” than former President Trump, in an interview released Thursday.
However, she did make it clear that she thinks neither Trump nor Biden should be the next president.
“I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president. I mean, you look at both of these men and all they have done is given us chaos. All they’ve done is given us division,” Haley told NPR’s Steve Inskeep, when asked whether she thought it would be “a calamity for this country” if Trump regained the presidency.
Inskeep asked Haley whether saying she has “more concerns” about Biden means she would back Trump over Biden, if they were the two remaining choices in the presidential race in November 2024.
“I think Biden is more dangerous,” Haley responded.
“We have seen the fact that, one, his policies are bad,” she said, listing illegal immigration, “corporate welfare,” and having moved “more towards socialism than any president we’ve seen in history,” as key issues for Biden.
Haley then criticized Biden’s “mental competency” saying it “has declined to a level that we should all be worried about.”
“Multiple things there show that he is not in a good state of mind to continue to lead, and that’s a problem,” she said.
The Hill has reached out to the Biden campaign for a response.
When Inskeep noted she has raised concerns about the mental competency of Trump as well, Haley said, “I have problems with both of them.”
“When you look at Donald Trump today versus Donald Trump of 2016, it’s different. And I think that we have to go and focus on what the newer generation wants, what we need to do going forward,” Haley said. “And it’s not having two 80-year-old candidates. I think that’s a problem.”
Haley, Trump’s last remaining GOP primary challenger, has made age a key focus on the campaign trail, calling for term limits and for mental competency tests for politicians over the age of 75 early on in her campaign. In recent campaign appearances, Haley has wielded the age argument as a tool against both Trump and Biden.
Haley’s interview, recorded Wednesday, comes just days before the South Carolina Republican primary, where The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average has Trump leading by 30.7 percentage points, 63.8 percent support to Haley’s 33.1 percent.