NEW HAMPSHIRE: Coming fresh off a commanding victory in the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald Trump came out heavily against GOP leader and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Tuesday (local time), New York Times reported.
He, however, also gave a message calling on his GOP rivals to come together and move into the Presidential polls as a team. In the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came a distant second with eight delegates and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley finished not much behind with seven delegates.
Trump painted Haley as out of touch with the conservative movement he helped inspire, negatively assessed her job performance as his ambassador to the United Nations, and accused her of trying to wrest control of the primary from Republicans.
“Nikki Haley is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary”, Trump said while addressing a rally at a country club in Atkinson, New Hampshire. “Haley was artificially boosting her numbers here by rallying such supporters”, he added.
Haley has been actively courting independent voters in New Hampshire, who make up a significant share of the electorate, and who can take part in the Republican primary. The contest now moves to New Hampshire, a state where Haley enjoys some political clout and is within a difference of single digits of Trump.
The former President avoided getting much attacking against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who managed a distant second spot at Iowa. “I don’t even want to talk about him (DeSantis), because I don’t want to waste it”, Trump said. “I do want to talk about Nikki.” He went on to call the former South Carolina Governor a “disaster” adding that she was “not tough enough” for the presidency.
But Trump’s focus was not entirely on Haley. He did repeatedly attack President Biden’s policies. But, citing the results in Iowa, he forcefully argued that efforts by Haley and DeSantis to knock him from his perch as the front-runner were “misguided”. “It’s time for the Republican Party to come together, unify and move forward as one team”, Trump said.
Aiming to underscore that point, he called to the stage one of his former rivals, Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the primary on Monday night after finishing a distant fourth and immediately endorsed Trump.
Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and a Trump acolyte, repeated many of his talking points from the campaign trail, which have long overlapped with Trump’s brand of politics. Following this, he also attacked Haley for being “insufficiently conservative”, New York Times reported.
“We do have some enemies that we need to defeat on the other side”, Ramaswamy said. “But we have challenges to address in our own party, right here at home.”
Meanwhile, the event on Tuesday (local time) kicked off a comparatively packed campaign schedule for Trump in New Hampshire. He is scheduled to hold five rallies in six days in the state, where he and his advisers are eager for a victory that could effectively shut his rivals out of a path to the nomination, New York Times reported.
Also, New Hampshire holds special significance for Trump, as his victory here in 2016 was the first he notched en route to the White House.
In the Iowa caucuses, Trump won 20 out of the 40 delegates from Iowa with 56,250 votes — a whopping difference of around 32,840 votes. Trump’s win at Iowa showed the hold he maintains over the party as well as its supporters, as he closed in for a 2020 rematch contest with incumbent Joe Biden, despite being levelled against multiple indictments and legal hassles. (ANI)