Haley, who finished third in Iowa, ramps up criticism of Republican rival but some say she can – and should – go further
In the final days before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, Nikki Haley is sharpening her attacks on Donald Trump as the former South Carolina governor courts the state’s famously discerning independent voters.
After coming in third in the Iowa caucuses, Haley’s is casting her candidacy as a “better choice” for a nation barreling towards a possible rematch between Trump, 77 and Joe Biden, 81.
“Do we really want to have two 80-year-olds running for president, when we’ve got a country in disarray and a world on fire?” Haley, who turns 52 on Saturday, is filmed asking during a CNN town Hall in Henniker, New Hampshire.
On the campaign trail and on social media, she has taunted Trump for refusing to debate her. This week, Haley announced she would only participate in Republican debates if Trump did. He refused, forcing CNN and ABC News to cancel two scheduled Republican debates.
At an event in Rochester, she accused Trump of throwing a “temper tantrum” after he berated her performance as his UN ambassador. It was Trump, she told voters in the town of Hollis, who “lost” Republicans control of Congress and the White House.
It’s a notable shift in rhetoric for a candidate who, until recently, had attempted to establish herself as the only viable alternative to Trump without taking him on directly. After months of implicit calls for “generational change” and competency tests for older politicians, she is now openly seeking confrontation with her former boss.
Trump hardly needed to be goaded into a response. At rallies and on social media, he has unleashed a torrent of attacks on Haley, even as he predicted an easy victory in New Hampshire and declared the race effectively over.
At a rally in Concord on Friday night, Trump said Haley was “not presidential timber” and essentially ruled her out of contention as his running mate. (Earlier on Friday, an anti-Trump Haley supporter said she assured him that being Trump’s vice-president was “off the table”.)
Haley has brushed aside some of Trump’s ugliest conspiratorial and race-based attacks as a sign that he was “insecure”. In a revival of the birtherism claims, he falsely suggested on social media that Haley, the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, was ineligible for the presidency.
