Fresh off his closer-than-expected victory in the New Hampshire GOP primary, former President Donald Trump is demanding that his main rival in the nominating contests, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, drop out of the race, claiming that she would be investigated by Congress immediately upon taking office if she became president.
Following his win, Trump belittled Haley numerous times; in a post on Truth Social, he called her “DELUSIONAL” for believing she still has a chance in the race against him, and during his victory speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, he claimed that she is unelectable, warning voters — and perhaps Haley herself — that she would be under constant scrutiny were she able to win the race for the White House later this year.
“Just a little note to Nikki — she’s not going to win, but if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes,” Trump told his supporters. “And I could tell you five reasons why already, not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about. But she will be under investigation within minutes.”
Trump also described Haley as an “imposter” who is “hanging around” too long in the nominating contests after losing to him in both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. “We beat her so badly,” Trump added.
Haley is refusing to drop out.
“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last,” she told supporters after the results from New Hampshire were announced. “This race is far from over.”
Trump’s claim that Haley would be investigated by Congress is perhaps laughable, given that he faced numerous investigations as president and was twice impeached by the House of Representatives. Trump also currently faces 91 criminal indictments across four different cases, including:
- 34 counts in New York, over allegations that he falsified business records in connection to hush money payments to cover up extramarital affairs he had prior to the 2016 election;
- 13 counts in Georgia, relating to his efforts to get state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win in the state;
- 40 federal charges relating to his improper retention of classified documents at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, following his departure from the White House in January 2021;
- And four federal counts relating to the events surrounding the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Haley faces extraordinarily long odds in being able to defeat Trump in future primary contests. But they aren’t impossible odds, and her second-place showing may actually demonstrate that she has the potential to put up a formidable challenge to the former president.
Indeed, according to an aggregate of polling data compiled by RealClearPolling in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, Haley was supposed to lose to Trump by more than 19 points. Actual results from the primary showed that she narrowed that gap, losing by around just 11 points and showcasing that nine in 20 GOP voters and independents voting in the primary wanted someone other than Trump to be the nominee.
Notably, since at least the 1970s, no Republican candidate for president has lost both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary and gone on to become the GOP nominee for president. But that scenario has happened twice on the Democratic side — once in 1992, when former Sen. Tom Harkin won in Iowa and Sen. Paul Tsongas won in New Hampshire but Bill Clinton wound up getting the nomination, and more recently in 2020, when Sen. Bernie Sanders won both nominating contests but Joe Biden became the party’s nominee.
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