PETERBOROUGH, New Hampshire — Nikki Haley ripped GOP front-runner Donald Trump Saturday for confusing her with Nancy Pelosi — and claiming she had to scold her then-boss when she served as his ambassador to the United Nations.
“Guess what, when you’re 80 you’re just not as sharp as you used to be,” Haley told a crowd of about 200 voters at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture, a museum in Peterborough, N.H.
She mocked Trump for his Friday night gaffe in Concord, N.H., when he referred to Haley instead of Pelosi as he discussed the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
“The man was going on a rant about how I was keeping Capitol police from going in on January 6. He went on and on,” Haley said.
“I wasn’t in DC on January 6. I had nothing to do with the Capitol.”
She also slammed Trump’s cozy relationships with foreign dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin
“Do you know I had to sit down with him when we were in the administration and tell him to stop this bromance he had with Putin?”
“It’s dangerous, you don’t do that,” she said sternly.
“We’ve got a world on fire right now.”
Trump has repeatedly defended his overtures to Putin and authoritarian leaders like China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, claiming that his sweet-talk approach to diplomacy was “a good thing, not a bad thing.”
But the hawkish Haley hauled out a laundry list of foreign policy grievances at multiple campaign stops Saturday, with two days to go before New Hampshire’s Tuesday primary.
“What about the fact that Trump praised President Xi of China a dozen times after China gave us COVID?” she asked.
“He said he stood with China when they took Hong Kong’s democracy. He congratulated the Chinese Communist Party on their 70th anniversary,” Haley continued.
“Who does that? Not an American president!”
She also described the agony of Cindy Warmbier, whose college-student son Otto was arrested in North Korea in 2016 and released with severe brain damage a year later.
“Do you know how hard it was for her to hear her president say that he was writing a love letter to the man that tortured her son?” Haley asked.
The former South Carolina governor is battling to close a 16-point polling gap between her and the former president after his decisive win in this week’s Iowa caucuses.