BEAUFORT, S.C. ― Nikki Haley knows she won’t win South Carolina.
But in the closing days of the GOP presidential primary here in Haley’s home state, the former South Carolina governor is making her most aggressive, if futile, case yet for why Donald Trump, her former boss, doesn’t deserve another chance at the White House.
With Saturday’s primary drawing near, Haley has suggested in recent days that Trump would rule as a king; slammed him for siding with dictators and abandoning allies; questioned his mental acuity; and warned that he would raise taxes while adding to the national debt and worsening the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Haley went from hardly mentioning Trump by name in Iowa ― the party’s first nominating contest, where she came in a distant third ― to focusing much of her stump speech on pitching herself as more competent and centered than either Trump or President Joe Biden.
At a rally in a moss-covered park in the coastal city of Beaufort on Wednesday, Haley tore into Trump over what she called his pattern of insulting current and former service members, including, most recently, her husband Michael, an officer with the South Carolina National Guard who is deployed in Africa.
“You mock one member of the military, you’re mocking every member of the military … [Trump’s] never worn a uniform. The closest he’s ever come to harm’s way is a golf ball hitting him on a golf cart,” Haley said to laughter from the crowd of several hundred.
“Bone spurs!” shouted a man in the audience, referring to the medical diagnosis that exempted Trump from serving in the Vietnam War.
“To hell with him!” another person yelled.
Many of the supporters drawn to Haley’s event — with the exception of a group of apparent MAGA supporters who criticized her for taking money from Democrats — were firmly anti-Trump.
Jean Muehlfeld, a retired teacher, said she’s voted for Democrats in the past, but was curious about Haley and open to supporting her in the GOP primary. Still, if the election comes down to a Trump-Biden rematch, as appears likely, Muehlfeld said her choice is clear.
“Biden has a lot of good people behind him,” she said. “I don’t know if Trump has the same person behind him every day or not. I mean, he’s so hateful.”
Haley, the first person to serve as Trump’s United Nations ambassador, spent several minutes lacerating Trump for refusing to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin after the sudden death last week of a prominent Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.
“He has sided with a guy who’s made no bones about wanting to destroy America, and Trump wants to stand with Putin instead of the allies that stood with us on 9/11? In that one moment, when he went off the teleprompter, he made our allies more vulnerable, but he made the situation for our military men and women in those areas less safe,” she said, referring to Trump’s remarks during a rally this month when he seemed to encourage Putin to invade NATO allies that don’t pay their dues.
Haley has vowed to continue in the presidential primary against Trump, even if South Carolina deals her what’s projected to be another humiliating defeat against the former president. Heading into the fourth major nominating contest, Trump is beating Haley 63% to 35%, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today survey of likely voters released this week.
Still, Haley is looking ahead to primaries on March 5, Super Tuesday, intending to take the fight to Trump in Michigan, Massachusetts, California and 12 other states. But Trump’s campaign argues it’s all for naught. In a memo released earlier this week, Trump’s senior advisers projected the former president would button up the GOP nomination as early as March 12, when more states cast their ballots.
“This is the diagnosis she refuses to accept: The end is near,” Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote Tuesday.
The delegate math for Haley may look daunting, but her campaign has plenty of gas left in the tank. January was her campaign’s strongest fundraising month, with $16.5 million in contributions. She has also had success in raising large sums of money off Trump’s attacks. She raised $1 million after Trump went after her husband, according to her campaign. And after Trump threatened to shun her donors from the MAGA movement, she sold 20,000 T-shirts with the words “Barred. Permanently.”
“If you’re running for president, you’re supposed to be bringing people in. It’s a story of addition. You don’t push people out of your club,” Haley said of Trump’s attacks on her supporters on Wednesday.
Haley likely won’t be the GOP presidential nominee, but the longer she sticks around and criticizes Trump’s every move, the more damage she could inflict on his chances of uniting the Republican Party in the general election against Biden.
Already, some Haley supporters say they would never vote for Trump and would rather abstain from the November election entirely.
“I don’t believe anything that comes out of that man’s mouth,” said Sheree Richnow, 68, a retiree from Beaufort. “We just don’t have a good choice if those are our choices,” she said of a second Biden-Trump matchup.
“I cannot vote for Trump,” said Greg Schulte, a retired veteran of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “Trump is a RINO, a Republican in name only. He’s not a Ronald Reagan Republican.”
And Marty Hupka, an 86-year-old retired contractor from Saint Helena, said there was “no doubt in my mind” he would vote for Biden over Trump if it came to it.
“It’s like, the lesser of two evils,” explained Hupka, who was holding a Haley sign.
