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Nikki Haley has warned Donald Trump that he needs to “quit whining” about Kamala Harris succeeding Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket or face defeat in November’s election.
The former South Carolina governor – who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration before incurring the former president’s wrath by running against him for the Republican presidential nomination this year– appealed to Trump to focus on substantive policy issues rather than crude identity politics.
Speaking to Bret Baier on Fox News on Tuesday, Haley noted that she had foreseen the vice president succeeding Biden during her campaign.
“Republicans should not be surprised that we are now running against Kamala Harris. It was her all the time,” she said.
“There was no way Joe Biden, in the condition that we saw him, could take on the stresses of a presidential election. So that was something I believed in then. It’s why I constantly referred back to her, because I knew that Kamala Harris was the person that we had.
“And the one thing Republicans have to stop doing: Quit whining about her. We knew it was going to be her.”
Haley dismissed conservative complaints that Harris is yet to do a major sitdown interview since securing her party’s nomination, declaring: “You don’t need an interview from Kamala Harris. I take her at her word.
“I take her at her word that she wants to raise taxes for households over $100,000, that she wants to add a pharmaceutical tax and a healthcare tax.
“I take her at her word that she thinks that illegal immigrants should be able to vote and be given driver’s licenses. I take her at her word that she wants to ban fracking and kill a bunch of US jobs. Take her at her word.”
Republicans have worked hard to blame Harris for the immigration crisis at the US southern border – despite Republicans blocking a border bill, at the behest of Trump.
Turning to Trump, whom Haley has ultimately endorsed despite a bitter war of words during the primaries, she urged him to drop his obsession with competing crowd sizes.
“I want this campaign to win,” she said.
“But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she is dumb. You can’t win on those things.”
She concluded: “I think the campaign needs to focus. That’s the main thing. Look, this is a winnable election, but you need to focus. Who is your target market? Your target market is suburban women, college-educated, independents and conservative Democrats. That’s your target market.”
Haley isn’t the only Republican urging Trump to change tact with his attacks on Harris.
Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy made a similar argument on Fox News on Monday, telling Trump directly to drop the crowd size gripe.
“Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to... What did she do as [California] attorney general on crime?” he suggested.
“What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”
Trump has spent the last three weeks struggling to accept the about-turn in his electoral fortunes since Biden stepped aside and Harris rose to the top of the Democratic party’s ticket. Since then, she has surged in the polls amid an outburst of public enthusiasm for her candidacy.
With his triumphant appearance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July now little more than a distant memory, Trump has taken to raging at the unfairness of it all, to his followers on Truth Social and to the reporters he summoned to Mar-a-Lago for a particularly unhinged press conference.
Republican strategists have since warned The Independent about the former president’s difficulties in maintaining “message discipline”, observing that he is currently conducting fewer rallies and showing less energy as a campaigner, appears more easily influenced than ever before and betrays distinct signs of saying something “crazy” at any moment.
