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Nikki Haley is campaigning laborious, making the tv rounds and ramping up her rhetoric in opposition to Donald Trump.
She is preventing on her dwelling turf – South Carolina, the state that is aware of her finest – and but the media are appearing in some ways as if the marketing campaign is over.
That’s largely as a result of the state’s former governor trails Trump by 22 to 36 proportion factors, in accordance to the final a number of South Carolina polls.
Haley isn’t solely method behind Trump, she’s not closing the hole in a method that makes it a aggressive contest on Saturday.
And if she loses by greater than 20, the pundits will view that as the closing nail in her political coffin.
Republican presidential candidate former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks throughout Fox News’ “Democracy 2024: South Carolina Town Hall” on Feb. 18 in Columbia, South Carolina, forward of its Republican main on Feb. 24. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Beyond that, I can’t consider a single state that Haley can win outright. She says she’ll proceed at the very least by Super Tuesday, however the former president could have mathematically clinched the nomination by then, or shortly afterward.
This isn’t a knock on Haley (although contemporaries say she burned some bridges in South Carolina). The former U.N. ambassador managed to be the final lady standing, nicely after Pence, DeSantis, Scott, Christie and the others dropped out. But it’s instructive to take a look at how she’s campaigning, and why Trump – despite his 4 indictments and $355 million civil fraud penalty – appears unstoppable.
In a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Haley more and more tried to tie Trump to Vladimir Putin’s murderous techniques in the wake of the Arctic jail killing of opposition chief Alexei Navalny:
“When you hear Donald Trump say in South Carolina a week ago that he would encourage Putin to invade our allies if they weren’t pulling their weight, that’s bone-chilling, because all he did in that one moment was empower Putin. And all he did in that moment was, he sided with a guy that kills his political opponents, he sided with a thug that arrests American journalists and holds them hostage, and he sided with a guy who wanted to make a point to the Russian people, don’t challenge me in the next election or this will happen to you too.”
TRUMP’S NATO COMMENTS TRIGGER FIERCE MEDIA AND EUROPEAN OPPOSITION: HOW SERIOUS IS HE?
What’s extra, Haley informed Jonathan Karl, “it’s actually pretty amazing that he – not only after making those comments that he would encourage Putin to invade NATO, but the fact that he won’t acknowledge anything with Navalny. Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents, or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal.”
Trump had mentioned he wouldn’t shield any NATO nation that didn’t spend 2% of its funds on protection, and in that case he would encourage Putin and Russia to “do whatever they hell they wanted.” He has made no point out of Navalny’s dying, which President Biden shortly blamed on Putin.
Haley reminded viewers that if Ukraine falls, Poland or the Baltics may very well be subsequent.
Aerial footage exhibits blasts on Ukrainian coke plant. (Reuters)
Now take into consideration this. If a candidate not named Trump had made feedback interpreted as probably blowing up the Atlantic alliance – drawing condemnation from high European leaders – and stayed silent when Russia’s dictator had the opposition chief killed, after a earlier poisoning try, wouldn’t there be a political uproar?
But since it’s Trump, who as president had a pleasant relationship with Putin, there was scant criticism from Republicans. If Trump believes it, most of the social gathering falls into line.
It harkens again to his outdated 2016 line about taking pictures somebody on Fifth Avenue. Just as the Senate appeared on the verge of passing a bipartisan border invoice that included help to Ukraine and Israel, Trump torpedoed the measure by popping out in opposition to it.
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And in a FOX city corridor Sunday evening, Haley, who typically says her ex-boss was a great president at the time, supplied a extra adverse evaluation:
“There were things that he did wrong,” Haley informed John Roberts. “His press conference in Helsinki, when he went and was trying to buddy up with Putin, I called him out for that. I explained that deeply in my book…how he was completely wrong. Because every time he was in the same room with him, he got weak in the knees. We can’t have a president that gets weak in the knees with Putin.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman informed him of Alexey Navalny’s dying throughout a gathering with staff at the AO Konar plant on Feb. 16 in Chelyabinsk, Russia. (Contributor/Getty Images)
About 20 minutes after Haley used the “weak in the knees” line yesterday on “Fox & Friends,” saying Trump has “yet to say anything about Navalny’s death,” the ex-president responded on Truth Social:
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.” You might need seen the pivot, and the failure to point out Putin in any respect.
All this, in a nutshell, is why the press are much more enthusiastic about the veepstakes chatter surrounding Trump than in Haley’s dogged campaigning.
What most of the media and different critics fail to perceive is that Trump represents the majority of his social gathering. He has remade the GOP in his personal picture. Most leaders, with the notable exception of the strongly pro-Ukraine Mitch McConnell, observe their chief, as do rank-and-file members afraid of a Donald-backed main challenger.
Speaker Mike Johnson admitted he consulted with Trump earlier than declaring the border compromise DOA. Marco Rubio, who two months in the past helped move a regulation barring any president from withdrawing from NATO, mentioned he had no downside with Trump’s remarks about the alliance.
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There are even traces that Haley gained’t cross. Asked repeatedly on ABC whether or not she nonetheless plans to endorse Trump if he wins, as she mentioned at the marketing campaign’s outset, Haley saved deflecting the query.
A decade in the past, Haley’s pro-military and anti-Russia views would have been a cushty match for the Republican Party, however that social gathering now not exists.
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