Just one year ago, Donald Trump and his team were openly welcoming Nikki Haley into the GOP presidential primary, even as the former president was privately trashing her for being a “two-faced” phony who didn’t know when to stop turning against — then back to — him.
For much of 2023, Trump, his senior staff, and outside supporters mostly left Haley, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, alone — sometimes at the specific urging of Trump advisers, according to two Trump allies and a screenshot of messages reviewed by Rolling Stone. Some on Team Trump argued to MAGA surrogates that any minor polling boost for her would help bleed support from Trump’s top 2024 rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and that they should resist the impulse to “dunk on” or “light up” Haley just yet. Trump himself similarly told some close associates and GOP politicians in mid-2023 that they didn’t “need to attack” Haley, and that for the most part, his allies should let her, DeSantis, and the rest of the field “tear each other apart,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Flash forward a year, and DeSantis’ presidential bid now appears doomed on the doorstep of the Iowa caucuses. With Haley’s poll numbers getting a bounce in New Hampshire, Iowa, and elsewhere, Team Trump has assessed it doesn’t need her anymore to double as one of their secret weapons to “ratfuck” DeSantis. Trump and his reelection operations are now in full-blown “wreck-Nikki-Haley mode,” one adviser to the ex-president says, and they’re pouring millions into ads and other efforts to bury her.
“Team Trump smartly used Nikki Haley as a weapon of mass destruction to destroy DeSantis’ coalition, knowing that in the end Haley would never be able to put together a winning coalition in the primary, given all the weaknesses she has on the right,” says a source close to the Trump campaign.
The Trump camp’s hard pivot to Haley as a main focus of its ire is evident in new TV ads and websites it recently built to attack the former South Carolina governor. On HaleyFacts.com, registered in late December and unveiled on Friday, the Trump campaign highlighted Haley’s repeated promises to cut Social Security benefits. The site hosts an ad the Trump campaign has run in New Hampshire, claiming that Haley would “end” the promise of a “secure retirement” — an attack line recently echoed by the Trump-aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc.
Trump’s campaign released an ad calling Haley “weak” on immigration, accusing her of opposing Trump’s border wall and travel ban policies — claims that were largely debunked by Politifact. MAGA Inc. has been running a similar anti-Haley ad, including in New Hampshire, that pays homage to Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric about undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s campaign staff also briefly ran a spoof site purporting to show Haley as President Joe Biden’s running mate. BidenHaley.org ripped content from the Biden 2024 campaign site and edited a picture to place Haley standing next to Biden, instead of Vice President Kamala Harris, according to cybersecurity researcher Kyle Ehmke. The site, which was briefly live last week, now redirects visitors to Trump’s main campaign site.
As for Trump himself, in the past few weeks he has been asking some advisers, with significantly greater frequency than he has before, about how Haley is doing in the polls in this month’s upcoming New Hampshire primary, according to a person close to Trump.
“She’s going to fade,” John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster, tells Rolling Stone. “In the meantime, she’s not what she says she is to voters — and when voters find out where she really is on the issues, our numbers show that she will fade, and our data is already showing signs that she’s fading fast. The whole Nikki Haley campaign is about invading the Republican primary with behavioral Democrats and Biden voters, and it’s not going to work… Our data and the voters we polled also show that her rhetoric on Social Security cuts, the travel ban on terrorists, the border wall, and other things really, really does not sit well with Republican voters.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement on Sunday, “Nikki Haley is a paper candidate. When people find out what she’s really about and her anti-America policy positions, there’s no excuse she can give that will make her palatable to Republican voters.”
Since the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol that Trump instigated at the end of his term in the White House, Haley has turbo-charged her reputation among the MAGA elite for being, at best, the former president’s fair-weather friend. Shortly after the Capitol assault, she publicly denounced Trump and said his post-election actions would be “judged harshly by history.” In a matter of mere weeks, she became just one of many GOP figures to go crawling and simpering back in Trump’s direction, as polling showed the riot had not dislodged his beloved status among conservative voters.
Nowadays, even while she is at times critical of Trump, she still vows, if she is elected this year, to pardon the ex-president, if he is convicted in the ongoing criminal cases against him.
The ex-president, for his part, has now elevated Haley to a prominent focus of his spite at campaign rallies — a position mostly enjoyed for the past year by DeSantis — and rails against her as a “globalist” Republican. “She likes the globe,” Trump said at a recent rally. “I like America first.”
And in yet another sign that the former president is prepared to throw anything at the wall to try to quash Haley’s poll bump, Trump recently boosted a meritless birther claim about Haley, suggesting she can’t legally be the U.S. president because of her parents’ immigration status at the time of her birth.
For well over a year, various Republican Party bigwigs and operatives backing other candidates have warned, both publicly and privately, that a crowded 2024 GOP field would benefit Trump and risk an outcome reminiscent of 2016. That was, of course, when the non-Trump vote was split for a lengthy period, aiding Trump’s blitz to consolidate support in the primary all the way to the summer’s nominating convention.
In 2024, though, Trump entered the race as the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and movement, and far and away the most popular figure on the right. Still, for the past year, Trump and his staff have watched with relish as Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other candidates have done some of the work for them in torpedoing DeSantis’ national ambitions.
For one thing, Team Trump’s quiet scheme to give Haley’s campaign plenty of room to grow last year — as a counterweight to DeSantis — was inadvertently assisted by conservative billionaire Charles Koch’s political network. The Koch network’s super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action), endorsed Haley in late November and has since spent over $27 million supporting her candidacy, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
For years, certain parts of the Koch political network have been critical of MAGAfied conservatism, and have urged the Republican Party to move on from Trump, the overwhelming favorite among the GOP electorate. (AFP Action has spent over $9 million on ads against Trump’s reelection bid.)
Indeed, when AFP Action threw its support to Haley, Trump publicly celebrated it as a “minor hit” for DeSantis.
That spending may have helped elevate Haley over DeSantis in the GOP primary — as Team Trump hoped — and now she is Trump’s chief target as Iowans head to the Republican caucuses on Monday.
