In the final stretch leading up to the South Carolina primary, Nikki Haley is hammering former president Donald Trump over his history of attacking U.S. service members, including her own husband.
Haley hopes the comments can help her eat into Trump’s lead in a state where military votes make up a key portion of the electorate. South Carolina is home to 15 military bases, and active military personnel made up 729 out of every 100,000 people in the state as of 2020 — the eighth-highest share among the 50 states.
U.S. Army Retired Brigadier General Don Bolduc, a Haley surrogate, held a press conference in Charleston on Wednesday morning to slam Trump over his “unhinged” comments about Michael Haley and his “disrespect” for veterans and members of the U.S. military.
During a rally on Saturday, Trump seemed to imply there was a sinister reason why Michael Haley had not been on the campaign trail with his wife, when in fact he is a major with the South Carolina Army National Guard who is currently deployed to Africa.
“Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away. He’s away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband?” Trump said. “Where is he? He’s gone.”
Nikki Haley hit back, saying at her own campaign event on Saturday, “If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being president of the United States.”
On Monday, her campaign released a new digital ad seizing on Trump’s long history of attacking military veterans. The spot includes comments Trump made about the late Senator John McCain in 2015, when he said the Navy veteran, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years, was “not a war hero” and that he likes “people who weren’t captured.”
It also includes allegations from former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, himself a retired Marine general, that the former president called deceased American veterans “losers” and “suckers” behind closed doors when he didn’t want to visit a World War I cemetery in the rain. Trump has denied that he ever made these comments, however.
But it’s not clear whether Haley’s blows are landing.
Brad Mallett, an Air Force veteran and owner of Coastal Coffee Roasters in Summerville, S.C., told National Review that Trump “is a guy that we all wish had removed his Twitter account a long, long time ago because he just says things to say it,” but said he doesn’t believe Trump’s comments are disqualifying. He questioned why Haley would stoop to the level of attacking Trump over the comments and suggested both candidates should focus more on policy and less on attacking each other.
“I don’t think that either side wants to put our military in a bad light. They’re both very strong supporters of the military,” said Mallett, who told NR he already voted early in the state’s GOP primary but declined to say whom he supported.
He suggested the media could have taken Trump’s Michael Haley comments out of context. “Now, maybe he did in this case, say all that stuff. It’s an election, people are going to say stuff that may or may not be true. I would like to think that the president of the United States would not do that to anybody.”
Dwight Decker, a Navy veteran who owns Black Force, a mixed-martial-arts gym near Charleston, previously supported Ron DeSantis but has chosen to support Trump since the Florida governor dropped out of the race. He said he doesn’t like Haley because he believes she has flip-flopped on a number of issues and has “taken money from people I don’t agree with.” He’s unbothered by Trump’s military comments.
“I think he’s just talking off the cuff,” Decker said. “He has no filter. He’s kind of the bull in the china shop. But I’ll tell you this, I think right now what the U.S. needs is a bull in a china shop that is actually going to come in, get things done and make sure they’re done not just talk out of one side of his mouth and do something on the other side of his mouth that Nikki Haley has done numerous times.”
A new Winthrop University poll released Wednesday spells trouble for Haley in her home state: The survey found her trailing Trump by a whopping 36 points. Those results are largely in line with a RealClearPolitics polling average that has Trump leading by 33.5 points.
And looking toward the general election, Trump’s recent comments have given Democrats fodder as well.
President Biden responded to a clip of Trump’s comments on Michael Haley saying, “The answer is that Major Haley is abroad, serving his country right now. We know he thinks our troops are ‘suckers,’ but this guy wouldn’t know service to his country if it slapped him in the face.”
And late last month, VoteVets, a liberal veterans PAC, launched a 60-second ad in Pennsylvania highlighting Trump’s past comments about veterans. The ad highlights Trump’s alleged “losers” and “suckers” comment and features Gold Star parents saying their children were not losers or suckers and saying Trump is in fact “the real loser.”
Biden won the swing state by a razor-thin margin in 2020.
But for all the backlash Trump received over his first comments on Michael Haley, the former president appeared to double down on Tuesday, suggesting he should leave his deployment early to help his wife “save her dying campaign.”
“Tricky Nikki is CRASHING in the Polls,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “She is 15 points down to Crooked Joe Biden, and I’m crushing him in all Polls. She’s got no reason to make it to the South Carolina Primary.”
“The other day, she had almost no people attend her ‘rally’ (We had thousands and thousands who couldn’t even get into the large arena), an embarrassment to her wonderful husband, in Africa. I think he should come back home to help save her dying campaign,” he added.
It’s not the first time Trump’s military comments have gotten him into hot water in the GOP primary. Over Memorial Day weekend last year, Trump’s team got into a back-and-forth with Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s then-presidential campaign.
The clash began when a Trump campaign spokeswoman claimed that the Florida governor’s history of seeking elected office was evidence that he’s “someone who’s in it for himself” and not the country. DeSantis’s rapid-response team responded to the claims with a picture of DeSantis in uniform serving overseas.
The spokeswoman answered with a picture of Pete Buttigieg in uniform, as if to dismiss DeSantis’s record. Then an outside Trump surrogate doubled down, publishing images of Representative Dan Crenshaw, former representative Adam Kinzinger, and the late senator John McCain, claiming they had also “use[d] the veteran card” to distract from their “corrupt actions as politicians.”
The DeSantis team, not to be outdone, shot back: “Team Trump: Being in the military doesn’t mean s**t. Happy Memorial Day.”
Around NR
• After Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip’s special-election loss on Tuesday night, Noah Rothman looks at Trump’s failure to take accountability for his detrimental impact on the party:
“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Donald Trump told a reporter on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” The former president’s smirk betrayed his attempt at self-deprecating humor. But like all good jokes, Trump’s remark contained an element of truth. The likely GOP presidential nominee has become proficient at deflecting blame for his party’s electoral losses away from himself and his movement. In Trump’s preferred formulation, neither can fail on their merits. They can only be betrayed.
• You can overanalyze special House elections, but all things being equal, Republicans would have preferred to win the special election in NY-3, writes Jim Geraghty:
You can see the signs that 2024 is looking a lot like 2022, an environment where the public is frustrated with Democrats and Republicans should be romping to victory, but they don’t — in large part because the Trump-loyalist leaders of the party look like the characters in the Star Wars bar scene instead of competent, professional, clear-eyed problem solvers. Suburbanites, generally speaking, don’t like parties whose leaders embrace kooky conspiracy theories. They don’t like relitigating elections that they see as having been resolved years ago. They don’t like tirades on social media.
• Rich Lowry looks at the last time an unfit incumbent ran for reelection:
There’s a tried-and-true method for a White House to deal with a seriously ailing president — lie about it. The American public, of course, didn’t know the truth about Woodrow Wilson’s condition after his stroke, nor about the extent of JFK’s health difficulties. Meanwhile, FDR’s dire condition was kept from the public when he was running for a fourth term that he had no business attempting. He died 82 days after his inauguration.
• Dan McLaughlin finds that the RFK Jr. Super Bowl ad, which overlaid a 1960 JFK ad with the 2024 candidate’s face, did what it was meant to do:
The first rule of Super Bowl ads is to make sure the watchers see or can’t miss hearing the name of the product — a hard task because lots of people are watching in crowded living rooms and bars with a lot of chatter. This ad did that in spades, by hammering home the candidate’s famous name, his image, and the fact that he’s running for president
• The Haley campaign blamed Trump for Pilip’s special-election loss in a statement on Tuesday night, James Lynch reports:
“Let’s just say the quiet part out loud. Donald Trump continues to be a huge weight against Republican candidates. Despite the enormous and obvious failings of Joe Biden, we just lost another winnable Republican House seat because voters overwhelmingly reject Donald Trump,” Haley national spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement.
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