Donald Trump is demanding far more than a win in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
The ex-president is calling on Republican voters to deliver him a triumph over Nikki Haley that is so comprehensive it all but ends the nationwide nominating contest before it properly begins.
And Trump is already using his relentless political machine to try to crush Haley’s White House dreams in South Carolina, the next big primary state, where she served as governor and hopes to transform the race.
The former president, who is leading Haley by 11 points in a new CNN poll published Sunday, is on a roll following his romp in the Iowa caucuses last week.
At a rocking rally in Manchester on Saturday night, Trump blasted the former South Carolina governor’s appeal to critical undeclared voters who are allowed to vote in the GOP primary in New Hampshire. He said it’s proof she’s an outlier in a party dominated by his “Make America Great Again” populism. “They want to turn liberal voters into Republicans for about two minutes while they vote and then go back to being liberal voters in the Democrat vote. It’s a terrible thing,” Trump said.
In an unusual move in a state that can be prickly about its first-in-the-nation status, Trump looked past Tuesday to the critical South Carolina primary next month, seeking to show that Haley’s chances of a genuine tilt at the nomination are futile. He turned frigid New Hampshire into an outpost of the balmy Southern state – where Haley won two terms as governor but that is now a MAGA bastion – calling GOP leaders, including the current governor and lieutenant governor, onstage to endorse him and to slam her as a Democrat in disguise.
“Those great philosophers, the Spice Girls, tell us what you want, what you really, really want. That’s what we are here to tell you what we in South Carolina want,”…
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