Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has emerged as Donald Trump’s strongest rival in the race for the Republican presidential nomination after Chris Christie, who failed to register significantly among voters, withdrew his candidacy.
Voting begins in Iowa on Monday, followed a week later on Tuesday by the New Hampshire primary. Haley beat Trump in New Hampshire and hopes to finish second in Iowa at the expense of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Still, Trump’s camp remains optimistic as the Iowa vote approaches after maintaining a significant lead in the polls for months. A top aide said Wednesday night that the campaign “couldn’t have scripted the Des Moines debate any better”, marvelling at the spectacle of the former US president’s rivals battling it out on the CNN stage while Trump, who continues to refuse to debate, took an easy ride at the Fox News gathering. Chris LaCivita told reporters after Haley fiercely debated DeSantis, while Trump performed on his own elsewhere:
If you watched any part of the ‘JV’ debate this evening, you see two campaigns that are beating the living hell out of each other. Then you have a Donald Trump commercial that shows up and he’s talking about Joe Biden … we couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves.
“JV” stands for junior varsity – a designation for college athletes who do not meet first-team standards. Speaking at Drake University, Haley said: “I wish Donald Trump was up on this stage”, but she spent most of the evening battling DeSantis, regardless of Trump’s whopping Iowa lead.
Tim Miller, a Republican operative turned anti-Trump activist who writes for Bulwark, a conservative Never-Trump website, delivered a scathing assessment of the Fox News town hall meeting.
Describing “a big prime-time ad campaign for a presidential candidate,” Miller said Trump’s hosts, “straight news reporters Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum,” sat “next to the disgraced former president, listening to his standup in the Catskills and giggling like a couple of college students after 5 mg of weed chewing gum.”
Trump has not avoided all the pitfalls. Trying to thread a particularly tricky needle, he questioned the severity of the abortion bans supported by Haley and DeSantis. But he also stated that “for 54 years [conservatives] have been trying to get Roe v Wade overturned, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”
