Just a year ago, Donald Trump and his team welcomed Nikki Haley into the GOP primary, even as the former president privately denounced her as a “duplicitous” fraud who didn’t know when to stop turning against him.
For much of 2023, Trump, his senior aides and outside supporters mostly left Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, alone – sometimes at the express urging of Trump advisers, according to two Trump allies and a screenshot of messages. which the US American ROLLING STONE saw. Some on Team Trump argued to the MAGA surrogates that any small increase in votes for Haley would help lose the support of Trump’s top 2024 rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and that they should resist the impulse , to “dunk” or “light up” Haley now. Trump himself told some close aides and GOP politicians in mid-2023 that they must not “attack” Haley and that his allies should let her, DeSantis and the rest of the field “tear each other apart,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
A year later, DeSantis’ presidential candidacy appears to have already failed before the Iowa caucuses. As Haley’s poll numbers have risen in New Hampshire, Iowa and elsewhere, Team Trump has determined that it no longer needs her as one of its secret weapons to “ruin” DeSantis. Trump and his re-election campaigns are now in “Wreck-Nikki Haley mode,” an adviser to the former president says, and they are pouring millions into ads and other efforts to destroy them.
“Team Trump cleverly used Nikki Haley as a weapon of mass destruction to destroy DeSantis’ coalition, knowing that Haley would never be able to form a winning coalition in the primaries given her weaknesses on the right,” said a source close to the Trump campaign.
The Trump camp’s hard pivot toward Haley as the main target of their ire is evident in new television ads and websites they have recently created to attack the former South Carolina governor. On the website HaleyFacts.com, registered in late December and published Friday, the Trump campaign highlights Haley’s repeated promises to cut Social Security benefits. The website features an ad that the Trump campaign ran in New Hampshire claiming that Haley would “end” the promise of a “secure retirement” – a line of attack recently launched by the Trump-allied super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. was taken up.
Trump’s anti-Haley commercial
Trump’s campaign released a commercial calling Haley “weak” on immigration and accusing her of opposing Trump’s border wall and travel ban – claims largely debunked by Politifact. MAGA Inc. has run a similar anti-Haley ad, also in New Hampshire, that pays homage to Trump’s “blood poisoning” rhetoric about undocumented immigrants.
Trump campaign officials also briefly ran a fake website purporting to portray Haley as President Joe Biden’s nominee. BidenHaley.org took content from the Biden 2024 campaign website and edited an image so that Haley was standing next to Biden rather than Vice President Kamala Harris, according to cybersecurity researcher Kyle Ehmke. The website, which was briefly online last week, is now redirecting visitors to Trump’s main campaign page.
As for Trump himself, in recent weeks he has asked some advisers much more frequently than before how Haley is doing in the polls for this month’s New Hampshire primary, according to a person close to Trump.
“It will fade,” John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster, told Rolling Stone. “In the meantime, she is not what she appears to voters to be – and as voters find out where she really stands on the issues, our numbers show she will fade, and our data is already showing signs of fading quickly becomes. The whole Nikki Haley campaign is about invading the Republican primaries with democrats and Biden voters, and it won’t work… Our data and the voters we surveyed also show that their rhetoric is focused on the Social Security cuts, the travel ban for terrorists, the border wall, and other things really, really don’t sit well with Republican voters.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement Sunday: “Nikki Haley is a candidate on paper. When people find out what she is really about and what anti-American political positions she represents, there is no excuse that can make her palatable to Republican voters.”
Since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that Trump incited at the end of his White House term, Haley has turbocharged her reputation among the MAGA elite as, at best, a fair-weather friend of the former president. Shortly after the attack on the Capitol, she publicly denounced Trump and said his actions after the election would be “judged harshly by history.” Within weeks, she was just one of many GOP figures left to grovel and croak on Trump’s back as polls showed the turmoil had not displaced his beloved status among conservative voters.
Haley vows to pardon Trump
Today, she is sometimes critical of Trump, but still vows to pardon the ex-president if she is elected this year and he is convicted in the ongoing criminal proceedings against him.
The ex-president, for his part, has now made Haley a prominent focus of his vitriol at campaign rallies – a position largely held by DeSantis over the past year – and labels her a “globalist” Republican. “She likes the globe,” Trump said at a recent rally. “I like America first.”
And in another sign that the former president is willing to throw everything against the wall to suppress Haley’s vote growth, Trump recently made a baseless “birther” claim about Haley, saying that she was due to her immigration status Parents cannot legally be President of the United States at the time of their birth.
For more than a year, various Republican Party bigwigs and representatives of other candidates have warned publicly and privately that a crowded GOP field of candidates in 2024 would favor Trump and risk an outcome reminiscent of 2016. Back then, the non-Trump electorate had been divided for an extended period of time, which helped Trump consolidate his support in the primaries leading up to the summer nominating convention.
Haley as a counterweight to DeSantis
In 2024, however, Trump entered the race as the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and movement and by far the most popular figure on the right. Still, over the past year, Trump and his aides have watched with relish as Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and other candidates did some of the work for them to torpedo DeSantis’ national ambitions.
For one thing, Team Trump’s quiet plan to give Haley’s campaign plenty of room to grow last year as a counterweight to DeSantis was inadvertently supported by conservative billionaire Charles Koch’s political network. The Koch network’s super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action), endorsed Haley in late November and has since spent more than $27 million on her candidacy, Federal Election Commission filings show.
For years, certain parts of the Kochs’ political network have been critical of MAGAfied conservatism and have urged the Republican Party to turn away from Trump, the overwhelming favorite of the GOP electorate. (AFP Action has spent over $9 million on ads against Trump’s re-election bid).
That spending may have helped propel Haley over DeSantis in the GOP primary — as Team Trump had hoped — and now she is Trump’s main target as Iowans head to the Republican primary.”