Three years after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump used the occasion to attack the few Republicans standing in his way of securing his third consecutive nomination. Two days before the New Hampshire primary, he chastised former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and cautioned his supporters not to get complacent.
At a Manchester rally, Trump declared, “We need big margins because we have to send real unity as a message.”
But for more than ninety minutes, Trump delivered the vindictive message that has become the centerpiece of his campaign. He bemoaned the loss of the 2020 election, defended the rioters on January 6, 2021, pushed for the Supreme Court to rule that he and all presidents are immune from prosecution, made fun of President Joe Biden, and, most aggressively, attacked Haley, the former UN ambassador and the front-runner in Granite State primary polls.
Even before he spoke, Trump’s campaign beamed its message on a big screen above the stage with rotating slides attacking Haley over supposed ties to “Democrats, Wall Street & Globalists” and her positions on Social Security and other hot-button issues.
When he took the microphone, Trump kept up the barrage.
“Nikki Haley is using radical Democrat money to run the radical Democratic campaign operation she’s running,” Trump said, referencing his rival’s appeal to some centrist and anti-Trump political groups and donors. “What the hell kind of Republican candidate is that?”
After running through a laundry list of policy criticisms, most pointedly Haley’s campaign pledge to raise the retirement age for younger people, delaying their access to Social Security payments, Trump jabbed back at Haley over her suggestion that he is too old to be president again – which followed an incident in which Trump confused her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“The concern I have is — I’m not saying anything derogatory, but when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do it,” Haley, 52, said earlier Saturday of Trump, 77, at a rally in Keene, New Hampshire.
Trump shot back at the rally, claiming he’s recently taken a “cognitive test,” which he “aced,” before promising to “let you know when I go bad.”
After finishing third in Iowa behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Haley’s campaign is on the line in New Hampshire. A found that 50% of likely GOP primary voters there support Trump, compared to 39% who back Haley. Haley has the support of a majority — 58% — of registered undeclared voters, but the former president is backed by 67% of registered Republicans.
Granite State voting rules — and their potential to help Haley — were a frequent target for Trump on Saturday night, as the former president groused over the potential for those who don’t consider themselves Republicans or typically vote for the GOP to cast ballots in its presidential primary.
But he added a false flourish to that case, telling the audience that Democrats, too, can take part on the Republican contest. They cannot.
“Registered Democrats cannot vote in the Republican primary, and registered Republicans cannot vote in the Democratic primary,” New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan told earlier this week after Trump leveled a similar charge.
Trump also looked ahead to the next major clash in the race: South Carolina. It’s Haley’s home state, where she was twice elected governor, but Trump leads there in the polls and among influential GOP leaders – a handful of whom showed up in New Hampshire.
“We could be in our home state, but we chose to come up to New Hampshire for a reason,” Rep. Russell Fry said. Gov. Henry McMaster invoked the Spice Girls – really – to tell voters “what we want, what we want” is Trump.
“You know what I’m doing, you know we’re going to be there in three weeks,” Trump remarked to his visitors, “I’m kissing ass.”
Once more, Trump’s wishes were the main focus.
He restated his argument that he and all subsequent US presidents ought to be immune from prosecution. This is a relatively new line of attack for Trump, who is awaiting a federal appeals court decision on his efforts to void the results of the 2020 election. He has maintained that presidents should never be held accountable for their deeds in the interim.
Trump is arguing his case in public even though the judge considering the allegation has shown skepticism. He used President Harry Truman’s 1945 use of the nuclear bomb in Japan as an example on Saturday night.
“Observe Harry Truman,” Trump exclaimed. He probably wouldn’t have carried out the Hiroshima bombing, which ended the Second World War but wasn’t exactly a good deed. Nagasaki. “I don’t want to do that because my opponents will indict me,” he stated, indicating that he wouldn’t be doing that.
Towards the conclusion of the war, the US unleashed atomic bombs on both cities; estimates place the number of deaths in Hiroshima alone at at least 15,000. Even though there has been discussion over the decision’s morality, Truman was not prosecuted.
Regarding DeSantis, Trump said a lot less. Even yet, he took pains to stress out how little he’d said about the governor of Florida (before, at the urging of a supporter, mocking his height). However, he was more complimentary of Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary.
Happily repeating Orban’s compliments, Trump remarked of the strongman, “It’s nice to have a strong man running your country.”