Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. Thepost–Trumpera had supposedly begun.
Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.
Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?
I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.
The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.
My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.
First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.
Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.
But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.
“The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”
And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.
“We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”
Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disruptor. In the business world, you bring in a disruptor when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”
Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”
“Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.
Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”
The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exception of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.
DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”
By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.
If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”
Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.
In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”
But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.
“I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”
These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.
DeSantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”
He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”
But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.
“I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”
By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”
This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.
Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.
This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.
The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary.
Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative leaders line up to reaffirm their allegiance to Trump. Several of Capito’s Senate colleagues joined the validation brigade around the same time: the GOP’s second- and third-ranking members, John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming, along with Trump’s long-ago rivals Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. None of their endorsements caused much of a ripple. Perhaps some mischief-maker surfaced the old video of Cruz calling Trump “a sniveling coward” in 2016 or Rubio calling him “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.” But for the most part, the numbing shows of conformity felt inevitable, just as Trump’s third straight presidential nomination now appears to be.
The GOP once prided itself on being an alliance of free-thinking frontiersmen who embraced rugged individualism, a term popularized by Republican President Herbert Hoover. This is no longer that time. Full acquiescence to Trump is now the most essential Republican “ethic,” such as it is, or at least the chief prerequisite to viability in the party. This near-total submission to the former boss has persisted no matter how egregious his actions are or how plainly he states his authoritarian goals.
Yet the Republican Party now appears to have entered a new level of capitulation to Trump: a kind of ho-hum acceptance phase, where slavish devotion has become almost mundane, like joining a grocery line. There’s a certain power in bland and seemingly harmless gestures from people who know better. Permission structures strengthen over time. Complicity calcifies in obscurity.
It’s natural to focus on the more blatant markers of Trump’s domination and his facilitators’ dereliction. You can scoff at the clownish stunts of sycophancy shown by the Ramaswamy-Scott-Stefanik wing of the hippodrome. Or marvel at the prevailing silence that greeted Trump’s vow to suspend the Constitution or the legal finding that he was liable for sexual abuse. Or be amazed by the swiftness with which Republican lawmakers reversed course this week on a bipartisan border bill, which many of them had demanded, simply because Trump insisted it die.
In a sense, though, the innocuous statements from the periphery, such as Capito’s post, are more stupefying.
Capito, 70, served seven terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in 2014. She has earned a reputation as a serious, relatively moderate lawmaker, and has forged a host of bipartisan alliances. She is the fifth-ranked senator in Republican leadership and is the ranking member on the Senate environment committee.
The daughter of a three-term governor of West Virginia, Capito was born into the status of “Republican in good standing,” something she has worked throughout her long career to maintain. This also makes her a classic “Republican who knows better.”
Like many of her GOP colleagues, Capito has expressed serious unease with Trump in the past. She said she “felt violated as an American” by the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters, which she called an “incredibly traumatic” experience. She voted against convicting Trump in the Senate impeachment trial over the riot but made a point of saying it was only because he was not in office anymore (“My ‘no’ vote today is based solely on this constitutional belief”). In general, Capito deemed Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election to be “disgraceful” and declared in a statement that “history will judge him harshly.”
Although she did not expect Trump to be the Republican nominee again—“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said in October 2021—Capito is now fully on board with his restoration. Her endorsement on January 27 carried an almost nostalgic longing for Trump’s time in the White House. “Our economy thrived, our nation was secure, and we worked to address the challenges at our border,” she wrote. Sure, Trump wasn’t perfect, but what’s a little violation, trauma, or national disgrace? Apparently it still beats the alternative, Nikki Haley.
Capito’s office declined a request for comment.
This is not meant to single out Shelley Moore Capito for special cowardice or delinquency. Okay, maybe it is meant to single her out a little, but mostly as an object lesson in the insidious complicity of going along merely by adding one’s name to a stockpile. (Trump had yet to receive a single endorsement from a Senate Republican at this point in the campaign eight years ago: Jeff Sessions of Alabama became the first, on February 28, 2016.)
Capito illustrates the power of the random. She could be any number of Republican officeholders. When he quit the presidential race last month, Chris Christie mentioned some others. “Look at what’s happening just in the last few days,” Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said in his exit speech, taking note of high-level elected Republicans who were falling into line. He singled out Barrasso and House Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
Barrasso and Emmer are “good people who got into politics, I believe, for the right reasons,” Christie said in his speech. They are both well-mannered institutionalists who have been flayed by the former president in the past: Trump dismissed Barrasso as Mitch McConnell’s “flunky” and “rubber stamp,” and torpedoed Emmer’s bid to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, deriding him as a “Globalist RINO.” Barrasso and Emmer would probably rather their party moved on from Trump.
And yet, they endorsed him. “They know better,” Christie said. “I know they know better.” From direct experience, in Christie’s case: He endorsed Trump in 2016 for what he now admits were purely political reasons. He then embarked on a long and at times debasing stint as one of Trump’s chief political butlers during his presidency.
In his speech last month, Christie said his biggest frustration with the GOP primary was that so many Republican officials and candidates complain privately about Trump yet remain loath to condemn him in public. (Of course, many Democrats engage in a similar dance about President Joe Biden and his age, expressing fulsome delight in public that he’s running for reelection at 81—he has the energy of a 35-year-old!—while moaning endlessly in private about how old he seems.)
Shared tolerance for conduct like Trump’s tends to build over time. “People are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope),” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which was quoted by my colleague Anne Applebaum in her 2020 Atlantic cover story, “History Will Judge the Complicit.”
“What’s just astounding to me is that there are so few outliers,” Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, told me. Edelman, a career foreign-service officer, is a friend of the Cheney family and a fervent critic of Trump.
“I know that ambition in Washington is kind of a garden-variety sin, right?” Edelman said. Partisan considerations are inevitable, he added, “but by and large, the people I saw in Washington, whether I thought their policies were good or bad, on some level you expected them to be animated by what’s best for the nation.”
Pioneers, by definition, are outliers. Republicans from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump were first viewed by their party as rogues or extremists. But the main driver for most politicians is almost always longevity, Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. “It’s to stay in the game for as long as you can, which is really the opposite of leadership,” said Sanford, who himself was an outlier—an anti-Trump Republican—which essentially cost him his job in Congress (he was defeated in a Republican primary in 2018). “Leadership is, I believe, This is my true north; I’m going to stand where I’m going to stand.”
Edelman quoted a line attributed to Ted Cruz in 2016, after Trump had defeated him in a bitter nomination fight, smearing the senator’s wife and father in the process. Cruz famously refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention that year. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told friends, according to an account by my colleague Tim Alberta in his 2019 book, American Carnage.
Cruz has since become a chief accessory to Trump in a party lousy with jacket-holders for the former president.
I remember being in Cleveland on the night Cruz gave his mutinous convention speech. It was a stirring and gutsy performance, the first (and last) time I’d ever felt much admiration for him. The bloodlust in the hall was palpable as it became clear that he was not building to any endorsement. “Vote your conscience” was Cruz’s crescendo line, which aroused the loudest boos of the night. They lingered like a warning siren, and if Cruz ignored it at the time, he has heeded it ever since. Add him to the list.
Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor, made the comments during a CNN town hall at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.
CNN moderator Jake Tapper said Haley’s political group, Stand For America, once referred to a previous version of the child tax credit as “no-strings-attached welfare handouts.” After noting these credits “cut child poverty in half,” Tapper asked Haley if she’s against expanding child tax credits to help more low-income families.
“I’m for child care tax credits for everyone. If you’re going do it, do it across the board and make sure that it’s fair,” she said.
Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Thursday speaks during a campaign stop at the historic Robie Country Store in Hooksett, New Hampshire. During a later CNN town hall, Haley discussed what she would do about the child tax credit if she wins the presidency. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Haley continued by saying that when evaluating welfare systems, “the goal that I want to look at is what are we doing to lift them up.”
She then spoke of her time as governor, saying she worked to help people on welfare find work with businesses that would train them.
“We moved 35,000 people from welfare to work. We had family parties so that we could celebrate the fact that they were now contributing members of society,” she said.
“Don’t just give handouts. What are you doing to lift them up to? And if you’re going to do tax credits, do it for everybody. Don’t play favorites. Don’t pick winners and losers,” she continued. “That’s not what we do in America.”
The GOP hopeful then described how tax credits could have a negative impact on some Americans.
“When you just throw out a tax credit and say, ‘We’re going give it to these people or give it to these people’—that’s not sustaining anything, that’s actually harming them. Instead, let’s do the harder work and say, ‘What can we do to get them into a better situation?’” Haley said.
CNN’s town hall with Haley took place days before New Hampshire’s Tuesday primary. Her campaign will look to benefit from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie withdrawing from the GOP race last week.
A CNN poll released on January 9 conducted by the University of New Hampshire (UNH) pointed to how Christie’s followers could help Haley. The poll found Haley had shaved Trump’s lead in the New Hampshire primary race to 7 percentage points. If Haley gains a sizable portion of Christie’s supporters, she may take the win in the state during its January 23 primary.
The CNN/UNH poll found 39 percent of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire said they would vote for Trump, compared to 32 percent who support Haley. However, the same poll showed 12 percent of the GOP voters said they would back Christie.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.
This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.
The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.
In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.
That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.
Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.
On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”
Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.
Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.
The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.
Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.
The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.
Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”
Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”
The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.
Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)
“Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”
Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.
“She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”
DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday, a move that will likely improve Nikki Haley’s chances in the New Hampshire primary. But according to Christie, it won’t matter, because Haley has no shot of beating Donald Trump.
Caught on a hot mic during his campaign’s livestream shortly before he announced his decision to bow out, Christie was heard telling someone, “She’s going to get smoked, and you and I both know it,” seemingly referring to the former governor of South Carolina. “She’s not up to this.” He added, “She spent $68 million, just on TV, spent $68 million so far…$59 million by DeSantis, and we spent 12. I mean, who’s punching above their weight and who’s getting a return on their investment?” Christie also claimed, “DeSantis called me, petrified.” The livestream was taken down shortly after that.
In announcing his decision to drop out of the race, Christie told a crowd in New Hampshire, “I promise you this: I am going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be President of the United States again. That’s more important than my own personal ambition.” He chose not to endorse another candidate but took shots at his competitors for failing to go after Trump as a threat to the nation. “No one will tell the truth about Donald Trump,” he said. “No one will tell the truth about his divisiveness, his stoking of anger for his own benefit.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Just over a week ago, Christie released a video declaring he would not leave the race, saying, “Donald Trump is ahead in the polls, and so everyone says anyone who’s behind him should drop out, and we should make our choice Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. Well, Joe Biden has had the wrong policies, and Donald Trump will sell the soul of this country. Neither choice is acceptable to me, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to you.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
N
ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s biggest foe is now dropping out of the 2024 Presidential Race. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced Wednesday that he was suspending his presidential campaign, just hours before another Republican debate (which he had not qualified to participate in).
In his announcement speech from Windham, New Hampshire, Christie started by discussing how he had always been in the race to tell the truth about Trump and his destruction and divisiveness. He noted that others, like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, have been lukewarm in attacking Trump, as they seemingly do not want to alienate his supporters. Christie dedicated much of his speech talking about ambition and the need to put the country before one’s self.
“For all the people who have been in this race, who have put their own personal ambition ahead of what’s right, they will ultimately have to answer the same questions that I had to answer after my decision in 2016,” Christie said. “Those questions don’t ever leave. In fact, they’re really stubborn. They stay.”
Christie also criticized pundits and the media for thinking Trump is a foregone conclusion as the GOP nominee. He admitted that he made a mistake dropping out in 2016 and supporting Trump, so how he’s handling this exit is intriguing. He knows that winning matters and seemingly believes that another Republican candidate besides Trump genuinely has a shot.
Christie stated that “in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again. And that’s more important than my own personal ambition,” while calling out other unnamed politicians who he says know better but still continue to endorse Trump. These people are scared and willing to throw our very democracy down the drain for political gain.
While I don’t support Christie, I am happy to see him go after his own party. He explicitly said that Republicans need to take responsibility for the role they have played in getting us to where we are. He even added Biden’s former slogan, saying that we need to fight for the soul of the party and soul of the nation. Fascinating tactic I suppose.
Christie ended by going after Trump personally, saying the former president feeds off of anger because he is an angry person. He went on and on about what he deems “petty politics” and how it is hurting us at home and internationally. Christie admitted that governing amidst “real disagreements” is hard, as he did it a lot as governor of New Jersey, but insists it can be done if we believe.
This is all inspiring to a degree, but I still question the intelligence of someone who voted for Donald Trump twice. Will Republican voters listen to him or even care? It isn’t looking good on that front but who knows.
Christie brought up the moment on the debate stage in Milwaukee when most GOP candidates raised their hands and said they would STILL vote for Trump EVEN IF he was convicted. Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and others, could not have ever imagined that they would be there having a conversation about if a criminal could be the President, Christie exclaimed. He is right though, that there’s not an explicit law against much of what Trump has done because no one really thought someone would do these things and that people would support them. This is a harrowing reminder of how deeply we have fallen, and how much more we can fall if Trump is to get in office again.
But wait, there’s more!
Amazingly, Christie managed to upstage his own announcement, as he was caught on a hot mic, going after Haley and DeSantis.
He said Haley is going to “get smoked” and that she’s “not up to this.” He also said that DeSantis is petrified but the audio didn’t go on further to explain exactly what that meant. How this plays out with him and the other candidates will be very riveting. Even towards the end of his speech he also made a funny quip about how the Civil War was of course caused by slavery. A remark aimed at Haley who couldn’t directly answer that question recently.
Chris Christie is caught on a hot mic ahead of his expected announcement that he’s dropping out of the presidential race:
He says Nikki Haley is “gonna get smoked” and a “petrified” Ron DeSantis called him. pic.twitter.com/fGOFEtVDHn
So what does this all mean—and why now? Why did Christie not wait until the New Hampshire primary, where the anti-Trump vote was expected to be the most significant of the early states? While Iowa’s caucus is just next week, Christie wasn’t expected to be a major player in that state. He did have support in New Hampshire, whose primary is next after Iowa, but dropping out now allows his supporters to back another candidate that’s likely not Trump.
So who will he endorse? According to CNN, 65% of his voters said Haley is their second choice, though his hot mic comments calling her not up to the job undercut any potential endorsement that might have come otherwise.
We’ll have our eye on this to see if Christie’s dropping out helps boost Haley or if it proves not to have any real impact in the end.
Chris Christie is expected to announce he is suspending his 2024 presidential campaign Wednesday night in yet another sign that Republican resistance to front-runner Donald Trump is melting away as the former president barrels toward his party’s nomination for a second term in the White House, according to The Associated Press and Bloomberg.
The former New Jersey governor had been a long-shot candidate in the Republican primary, struggling to break above single digits in polls of the contest while attempting to undermine Trump’s stronghold on the GOP. He faced pressure to end his campaign and endorse former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in a bid to boost her chances of winning the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary, where Trump leads in polls.
Christie formally launched his bid in June 2023, calling Trump “a bitter, angry man” who should be disqualified from the presidency. He issued dire warnings to his party about a second Trump presidency. The former president, Christie said, is a “dictator” and a “bully.” He spread his message on the debate stage and at conservative, Trump-friendly enclaves ― and was booed for it.
The former governor didn’t spare his fellow 2024 rivals from criticism, either. He called them bootlickers and questioned their unwillingness to criticize Trump.
“There’s only one candidate trying to stop Trump,” a Christie campaign ad said in December. “Chris Christie is the only one who can beat Trump, because he’s the only one trying to beat Trump.”
At one GOP primary debate, Christie called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “afraid” for not answering whether he believed Trump was mentally fit to be president. “Is he fit or isn’t he?” Christie asked as DeSantis evaded the question.
He also didn’t hold back against Haley when she failed to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War, accusing her of being “unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth” and auditioning for being selected as Trump’s vice presidential nominee.
“What’s going to happen when she has to stand up against forces in our own party who want to drag this country deeper and deeper into anger and division and exhaustion?” Christie asked recently.
Christie’s transformation from Trump’s longtime friend to a thorn in his side is somewhat head-spinning. The former governor was one of the first big-name Republicansto endorse Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, giving him valuable legitimacy. He went on to serve as Trump’s transition chairman and even defended him when he became president.
Not long after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, however, Christie shifted course, sharpening his criticism of Trump and his lies about winning the 2020 presidential election.
“I think everything that he was saying from election night forward incited people to that level of anger,” Christie told CNN about the Capitol riot, making it clear he held Trump directly responsible.
Trump, meanwhile, responded to Christie’s criticisms by hurling ugly attacks about his weight.
Christie seemed resistant to the idea of dropping out and endorsing Haley at a recent campaign event in New Hampshire.
“I would be happy to get out of the way for someone who is actually running against Donald Trump,” Christie said, according to The Associated Press.
“Let’s say I dropped out of the race right now and I supported Nikki Haley,” he added. “And then three months from now, four months from now, when you’re ready to go to the convention, she comes out as his vice president. What will I look like? What will all the people who supported her at my behest look like?”
GOP presidential hopeful Chris Christie released a new ad on Thursday in which he attempted to make amends for what he appears to believe was the worst mistake of his political career: supporting Donald Trump in 2016.
Yes, just a few short months after tellingVanity Fair’s Chris Smith, “I don’t make any…apologies for that period of time,” i.e., the period when he was fully aboard Team Trump, the former New Jersey governor declared: “Well, I was wrong. I made a mistake. And now, we’re confronted with the very same choice again. Donald Trump is ahead in the polls, and so everyone says anyone who’s behind him should drop out, and we should make our choice Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. Well, Joe Biden has had the wrong policies, and Donald Trump will sell the soul of this country. Neither choice is acceptable to me, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to you.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
One of the weird things about Christie’s mea culpa is that he apparently thinks someone who has “the wrong policies” is as equally dangerous as someone who “will sell the soul of this country,” who he has called a “dictator,” and who he said last week would “burn America to the ground.” (In his interview with Vanity Fair, Christie said he won’t vote in the general election if the choice is between Biden and Trump.)
The other weird thing is that you might come away from the clip thinking that the former governor realized the error of his ways shortly after 2016, or at least just after Trump became president—when, in fact, he was still supporting the guy in 2020 and did debate prep for the campaign that, as of a year later, he was saying he didn’t regret.
Of course, Christie coming around to the fact that he f–ked up, albeit many years after he should have, is better than not coming around at all. Which has been the case for other GOP hopefuls like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, both of whom have said they would pardon the ex-president if he is convicted of one of the many federal crimes he’s been charged with (and pleaded not guilty to).
New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary is just 20 days away with Donlad Trump still leading Republican polls despite Nikki Haley’s recent surge. CBS News campaign reporter Jake Rosen has more on how voters in the Granite State are feeling about their choices.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
For two Republican presidential candidates facing a desperate moment in their attempts to overcome former President Donald Trump’s frontrunner status in the GOP primary field, this week has already provided a stark contrast.
Around that same time, a sparse ad from Chris Christie’s campaign was publicly rolled out in which the former New Jersey governor honed his verbal attacks on Trump.
“He caused a riot on Capitol Hill,” Christie said in the direct to camera ad. “He’ll burn America to the ground to help himself. Every Republican leader says that in private. I’m the only one saying it in public. What kind of president do we want, a liar or someone who’s got the guts to tell the truth? New Hampshire. It’s up to you.”
Haley and Christie are on a collision course in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary as both candidates seek to benefit from the state’s quirky electorate where undeclared voters, who make up a major portion of the state’s voters, can decide to cast ballots in the GOP primary on Jan. 23.
Republican presidential candidates, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, left, talking with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, right, during a commercial break at a Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023.
Gerald Herbert / AP
“Telling the truth isn’t hard — particularly when you believe in what you are saying,” a source close to Christie replied.” The simplicity of Christie’s ad and message conveys that when you believe in what you are saying, telling the truth is easy.”
New Hampshire is likely the best chance for any Trump challenger to dent his standing early on, and Haley has seen a clear momentum according to a recent CBS News poll that had her in second behind the former president.
In a campaign whose main focus is litigating Trump’s faults and failures, Christie has staked his primary ambitions on a strong showing in New Hampshire. He hasn’t shied away from his past support for the former president, but has made emphatic warnings about what Trump being the GOP nominee could mean for the party moving forward.
That tactic has earned him support in the first-in-the-nation primary state. Haley has relied on a more delicate approach to taking on Trump, who appointed her as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during his presidency.
In recent months, Christie has ramped up criticism of Haley over her reluctance to tell the “truth” on various issues including Trump’s fitness to serve as president again and her position on abortion.
At a town hall event Thursday night in Epping, N.H., Christie knocked Haley over her comments on the cause of the Civil War.
“She’s smart and she knows better. And she didn’t say it because she’s a racist because she’s not. I know her well and I don’t believe Nikki has a racist bone in her body,” Christie said. “The reason she did it is just as bad, if not worse, and should make everybody concerned about her candidacy. She did it because she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth.”
Even one of Haley’s rivals from the right in the presidential primary, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted on social media that “the shocking part isn’t that Nikki failed to mention slavery.”
“It’s that she failed to mention the 10th Amendment,” Ramaswamy’s post said. “When you try to be everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone.”
Haley spent time on Thursday morning trying to clarify her answer.
“Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that, that’s unquestioned. always the case, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that,” Haley said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”
Anxiety within the part of the GOP ready to move on from Trump has also led to Christie facing calls to drop out in hopes of helping Haley. In 2016, Trump’s GOP challengers failed to consolidate behind a single alternative candidate in time to deny him the nomination, and there is fear that the same fate could play out again.
As Haley faced quick pushback this week, the challenge of consolidating more Trump critics behind her came into sharper focus.
“The calls for Christie to drop out really are predicated on the idea that there’s a lane for Nikki Haley, and that Nikki Haley could win, not only in New Hampshire, but then could go on to win the primary,” said Lucy Caldwell, who was the campaign manager for former congressman Joe Walsh’s longshot 2020 GOP presidential primary challenge to Trump.
Haley’s comment in Berlin, Caldwell said, helps “show that maybe there is a continued role for someone like Chris Christie to keep the flame alive for pro-democracy, non-lying, non-pandering to extremist, Republicans.”
Nidia Cavazos, Jacob Rosen and Annie Bryson contributed to this report.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s latest attempt to get on the Maine Republican presidential primary ballot failed Thursday after his campaign tried to recover from a surprising setback in the Super Tuesday state.
Earlier this month, the Maine Secretary of State’s office said that Christie’s campaign fell short of the necessary number of certified signatures needed from Maine voters to qualify for the state’s Republican presidential primary.
His campaign appealed the decision, but a Maine Superior Court judge sided on Thursday with the secretary of state’s handling of the situation.
“We appreciate that the court upheld the integrity of Maine’s well-established ballot access requirements,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said in a statement. “Every candidate, including presidential candidates, must follow the law to qualify for the ballot. We are glad that the court recognized that Maine law is workable and fair to all.”
Earlier this month, Maine Director of Elections Heidi M. Peckham said in a letter that Christie’s campaign had only turned in 844 of the minimum 2,000 certified signatures required to appear on the ballot.
Candidates faced a requirement of filing signatures with municipal clerks for certification before submitting them to the secretary of state’s office.
A Christie spokesperson responded at the time that the campaign had gathered 6,000 signatures, arguing it was “simply a procedural issue with the way they reviewed signatures and is under appeal.”
But the arguments put forward by Christie’s campaign failed to change the stance in the Maine case.
In a statement to CBS News Thursday following the ruling, a spokesperson for Christie’s campaign said that “we disagree with the court’s decision, and we are evaluating our options.”
According to the decision by Maine Superior Court Justice Julia M. Lipez, Christie “did not separate petition forms by town, as instructed by the Secretary, or, in the alternative, give himself sufficient time to bring those multi-town signature sheets to the relevant municipalities before the November 20 deadline.”
Christie still has the option to file as a write-candidate in Maine. The deadline to do so is Dec. 26, according to the secretary of state’s office.
The news is the latest trouble for the Christie campaign as he faces pressure to drop out of the race and help consolidate support around an alternative candidate to former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the GOP race. Christie’s strategy has centered around going all in on the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary. His campaign has maintained he has a path after the contest, but the struggles in Maine threaten to undercut that tone.
Leading Republican presidential candidates, and even some longshots, are set to be on the ballot in the Maine contest on March 5. Those include Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and pastor Ryan Binkley.
Wednesday at a town hall in Iowa, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley touted a recent New Hampshire poll showing she’s narrowing the gap between herself and Donald Trump. CBS News campaign reporter Nidia Cavazos has more.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Funding for Israel and Ukraine — particularly for Ukraine — has become a contentious topic for Republicans and one that Republican presidential candidates are frequently being asked to address during the primary campaign.
Congress is still struggling to pass aid packages for Israel and Ukraine, and this week, the White House budget director warned that without new funding, aid for Ukraine will be depleted before the end of the year.
Republican voters have become increasingly skeptical of Ukraine aid, CBS News polling shows, although support for providing military aid to Israel is much stronger than it is for Ukraine. A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this month showed 65% of Republicans support sending weapons and military aid to Israel, but only 45% of Republicans think the U.S. should send weapons and military aid to Ukraine.
Here’s where the 2024 Republican field stand on these questions.
Chris Christie
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is one of the fiercest proponents of robust funding for both Israel and Ukraine, and he hasn’t held back in criticizing his Republican opponents over their approaches to these crises.
He says he would have supported packaging aid to Ukraine and Israel together, which most Democrats also support.
The former New Jersey governor also traveled to Ukraine in August, becoming the second presidential candidate to do so. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has since dropped out of the race, was the first GOP candidate to make the trip in June.
Both Christie and Nikki Haley are more in the conservative mainstream on foreign policy, favoring the use of U.S. resources to support and promote democracy abroad. During the third Republican debate in Miami in November, Christie said funding Ukraine is “the price we pay for being the leaders of the free world.”
The former New Jersey governor also calls for funding Israel in its efforts to defeat Hamas. He was the first Republican candidate to visit Israel after Hamas launched its brutal and deadly assault on Oct. 7, and chided other Republican candidates for not visiting immediately, too. In Israel, Christie met with families of the hostages and survivors of Hamas’ assault. Christie has said providing support to Gaza should be a “very, very low priority,” compared to assisting the Israelis.
Ron DeSantis
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shares some of Donald Trump’s “America first” isolationist impulses and has been among the Republicans most skeptical of providing funding for Ukraine. Several Republicans blasted DeSantis earlier this year for calling Russia’s war on Ukraine a “territorial dispute,” a comment he quickly walked back.
But DeSantis has said Ukraine aid is not “vital” to U.S. national interests, and argues that the U.S. has more important problems closer to home to address.
“We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland, especially as tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from narcotics smuggled across our open border and our weapons arsenals critical for our own security are rapidly being depleted,” DeSantis wrote in March, when media personality Tucker Carlson requested candidates offer their views on the war in Ukraine.
DeSantis continues to be skeptical of U.S. funding for Ukraine, although he has not suggested the U.S. should stop supporting Ukraine altogether. Lately, DeSantis has avoided giving a specific answer on how he’d approach Ukraine funding.
In the September Republican debate, DeSantis said it’s “in our interest to end this war,” and said that’s what he would do as president.
But he strongly supports funding for Israel in its battle against Hamas. Last month, DeSantis said he’d arranged to send military equipment to Israel in his capacity as governor, and his office confirmed that Florida has sent cargo planes filled with drones, body armor and medical supplies to Israel.
Vivek Ramaswamy
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is as close to an absolute isolationist as there is in the GOP field. He not only criticizes the idea of sending aid to Ukraine, but also made a shocking and unfounded comment during the third GOP debate that seemed to suggest he thinks Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, is a “Nazi.”
He said, referring to Ukraine, “It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks. A comedian in cargo pants. The man called Zelenskyy.” (According to the New York Times, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy said his words had been misconstrued, and he had not called Zelenskyy a Nazi.)
He also appeared to adopt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinking in suggesting that regions of Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia are not part of Ukraine.
“The regions of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia right now in the Donbas: Luhansk and Donetsk. These are Russian-speaking regions that have not even been part of Ukraine since 2014,” Ramaswamy said during the Nov. 8 debate.
And unlike his Republican opponents, Ramaswamy doesn’t support funding for Israel in its fight against Hamas, a rare position for a Republican — or any national U.S. politician.
Ramaswamy thinks the U.S. should provide “no money” for Israel, but rather, diplomatic help, a “diplomatic Iron Dome.”
“In my ideal view of this, Israel should be able to make the decisions of how it defends itself and its national self-existence,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with Axios in October. “And we provide a diplomatic Iron Dome for Israel to be able to carry that out. And that’s it. No money.”
Ramaswamy has said any aid the U.S. provides Israel should be dependent on Israel’s plans to defeat Hamas, and told The Hill that destroying Hamas is “not on its own a viable or coherent strategy.”
Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, who has extensive foreign policy experience as the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, unequivocally supports providing substantial aid to both Israel and Ukraine.
Like Christie, she argues that Ukraine’s sovereignty and security is critical to U.S. security. Haley often says that victory for Russia would mean China, a close ally of Russia, wins, too. Haley says that President Biden should give Ukraine whatever it’s requesting. And she railed against the lack of Ukraine aid in Congress’ latest spending bill.
The former South Carolina governor has often clashed and feuded with Ramaswamy on Ukraine funding, and the two are diametrically opposed on foreign policy matters. Pointing at Ramaswamy during the last debate, she said Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are “salivating at the thought that someone like you could become president.”
Haley has not suggested that support to either Ukraine or Israel should be conditional.
Donald Trump
Because former President Donald Trump has declined to participate in any of the Republican debates, opponents haven’t been able to challenge Trump on his positions on Ukraine or Israel. And he doesn’t routinely participate in interviews with news organizations that ask critical questions.
Trump has said little about funding for Israel, and was initially critical of Israel’s response to Hamas and of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. He called Hezbollah “smart,” but has since expressed more consistent support for Israel. The former president has suggested this war may not be short.
“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out,” Trump told Univision in a recent interview. “You’re probably going to have to let it play out because a lot of people are dying.”
This differs from his view of the war in Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly claimed he would end the war there in short order. In an interview in May with Nigel Farage, a former U.K. politician who now hosts a show on GB News, Trump said that if he were president, he would “end that war in one day,” but he didn’t say how he’d do it.
“It’ll take 24 hours. I will get that ended. It would be easy,” Trump told Farage. “That deal would be easy. A lot of it has to do with the money.” He has even said he could broker a deal before taking office, if he’s reelected. The former president has said similar things at rallies.
The former president, who was initially impeached for withholding funding for Ukraine, has been critical of the country and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During his presidency, Trump asked Zelenskyy to investigate President Biden’s efforts in 2016 to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor widely seen by the West as corrupt.
Over the summer, Trump called for a pause on all U.S. aid to Ukraine until federal agencies provided “every scrap” of evidence they had on any business dealings from President Biden and Hunter Biden.
Trump has said Zelenskyy can’t “manage” the war with Russia, and Zelenskyy has urged Trump to share his peace plans, if he’s so confident he can attain peace as a president-elect.
2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy came out swinging against fellow candidate Nikki Haley in Wednesday’s GOP debate..
Ramaswamy said he was the only candidate on stage who was not as “neocon,” meaning a hawkish Republican who holds the foreign policy vision of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.
One of the most noteworthy moments of the night when Vivek Ramaswamy attacks Nikki Haley:
“Nikki is corrupt. This is a woman who will send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house.” pic.twitter.com/wNgme43DBX
“A real distinction, I think, is that I’m the only candidate who is a non-neocon,” Ramaswamy said in Milwaukee. “I believe in asserting American interests, but only where it advances the U.S. interest. I’m very different from other candidates who would sooner send troops to defend invasion across somebody else’s border than the invasion on our own southern border in this country.”
The term “neocons” arose in the 1960s to describe hawkish, “peace through strength” conservatives who favor military intervention and preventative action. The label peaked with President George W. Bush and his advisers, who pushed the War on Terror in the early Aughts.
“I worry that many in the neocon establishment are quietly marching us into World War III, serious armed conflict with other nuclear powers, including the combination of the Russia-China alliance,” Ramaswamy continued. “I am the only candidate in the race who has pointed out the alliance and the threat it poses, and the clear plan to pull them apart from each other.”
“This is a woman who would send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house,” he later added, speaking of his belief that Haley is interested in involving the U.S. in new wars.
At one point, Ramswamy held up his notepad revealing that his notes only said “Haley = Corrupt” in giant letters.
Vivek Ramaswamy holds up a “NIKKI = CORRUPT” sign as he obliterates Nikki Haley’s presidential aspirations and points out that misandry is a form of bigotry. pic.twitter.com/HHwFWoXUux
Haley responded, “There’s nothing to what he’s saying,” drawing audience applause.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie also took part in the debate.
The debate was shown on NewsNation whose own poll showed last week that while Donald Trump was by far the frontrunner, DeSantis was second with 11 percent and Haley registered 10 percent.
Trump’s 2020 campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley told News Nation before the debate that if the former did attend, he would “suck all the oxygen out of the room.”
“It’s fascinating to watch in politics,” Gidley said. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’ve never seen somebody with a stranglehold on a movement or on the base like Donald Trump has.”
Trump has made it clear that he sees no upside in taking part in one of the Republican presidential debates.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” Trump wrote on social media back in August. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel has still expressed her support for Trump, should he secure the nomination.
“If the voters choose him [Trump], [he] is going to be our nominee and the party will be behind our nominee,” McDaniel said.
What do you think about this? Let us know in the comments section.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust. The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”
With just 40 days until the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald Trump’s four chief rivals, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, took the stage in the fourth primary debate in Alabama. CBS News’ Robert Costa reports from the University of Alabama.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
During the fourth Republican Party debate on Wednesday night, the candidates present in Alabama were asked how they would address “the crisis on the southern border.”
National polls show immigration and migrants entering the United States illegally as among the top issues in the country. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wasn’t able to answer the question when it was posed by the moderators, but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, ex-South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy discussed the topic at length.
DeSantis spoke passionately about going after those who bring fentanyl into the country.
“The drug cartels are invading our country and they are killing our citizens,” DeSantis said.
GOP presidential candidates former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, left, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, right, on Wednesday participate in the Republican primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The candidates were asked what they would do about the “crisis at the southern border.” (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Florida lawmaker went on about the dangers of fentanyl in the U.S., relating a story about the drug’s residue being on the floor of an Airbnb rental, which he said resulted in the death of a baby.
“Is this acceptable in this country? I know the elites in D.C., they don’t care. They don’t care that fentanyl is ravaging your community. They don’t care that illegal aliens are ravaging our community and overwhelming our community,” DeSantis said. “The commander-in-chief not only has a right, you have a responsibility to fight back against these people. And it means you’re going to categorize them as foreign terrorist organizations.”
He then advocated for continuing construction of a wall along the southern border.
“Here’s the thing: If we had a wall across the southern border, which I support, this would not have happened. We need to build a wall across the southern border. I’ll get it done,” DeSantis told the audience, as he parroted Trump’s promise from years ago by saying that he’d make Mexico pay for it.
Before Haley discussed the issue, she was asked about comments she made regarding catching and deporting illegal migrants. Haley clarified that she would at first deport “all of the seven or eight million illegals that have come [into the U.S.] under [President Joe] Biden’s watch.”
“We have to stop the incentive of what’s bringing them over here in the first place,” she added, noting temporary protective status given to Venezuelans.
Haley said migrants who have been in the country longer should be examined if they’ve been “vetted” and “paid taxes.”
Regarding illegal drugs, she called for “special operations” to deal with cartels. Haley also said China should be punished for producing fentanyl.
“Look at where fentanyl came from. Let’s go to the heart of the matter. It came from China. That’s why we need to end all normal trade relations with China until they stop murdering Americans with fentanyl,” she said. “I promise you they need our economy. They will immediately stop that.”
Ramaswamy said, “The easy part is talking about how we’re going to use our military to secure the border. I will, and I believe that everybody else wants to do the same thing.”
He also supported action against China but said the “harder part” is addressing the “mental health epidemic raging across this country like wildfire” rather than hitting the “the demand side of it.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will take the debate stage in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to debate one last time before the Iowa caucus. CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa looks ahead to the fourth GOP 2024 presidential debate.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
File: (L-R) Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy
FREDERIC J. BROWNROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
Just four Republicans will be on stage Wednesday for the fourth Republican presidential debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the Republican National Committee announced Monday evening.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy are the four who met the qualifications, the smallest field yet to take the stage during the GOP primary campaign.
The threshold set by the RNC was the highest set so far, demanding candidates reach at least 6% support in two national polls or 6% in one national poll as well as two polls from four of the early-voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. The RNC approved the polls that would qualify candidates. And candidates also needed a minimum of 80,000 unique donors, with at least 200 from 20 states or territories.
And participants also had to sign a pledge promising to support the party’s eventual nominee.
Here’s where the candidates stand:
Ron DeSantis’ campaign and the super PAC supporting him have made substantial investments in Iowa, but he has faced some setbacks. In the hours after DeSantis wrapped up his tour of all 99 counties in Iowa on Saturday, news broke of further shakeups at the super PAC supporting him, “Never Back Down.”
Kristin Davison, who was named to be the PAC’s CEO shortly after Chris Jankowski left the job in late November, was fired Saturday. Communications director Erin Perrine and operations director Matt Palmisano were also let go that evening, according to sources familiar with the moves. Politico, Semafor and the Associated Press were first to report on the three moves.
Despite his efforts, DeSantis continues to trail front runner and former President Donald Trump by double digits, and former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley has been closing in on DeSantis with strong performances in previous debates and a shift toward foreign policy that plays to her strength in that area.
Ramaswamy, the youngest candidate in the field and a political neophyte, has had fiery debate-night clashes with Haley, and there could be more Wednesday night. During the last debate, Haley called the entrepreneur “scum” after he invoked Haley’s daughter during a critique of TikTok.
The 2024 race’s most vocal critic of Trump, Christie has cast himself as the only Republican willing to take him on directly. Without Trump at the debates, Christie has been left without his intended target but has brought him up nonetheless.
In September, Christie looked directly into the camera and declared that if Trump keeps skipping debates, he would deserve a new nickname: “Donald Duck.”
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” with moderator Margaret Brennan Sunday, Christie dismissed polls that show Trump far ahead of the field, despite the lawsuits and indictments in which he’s embroiled.
“Let’s remember something, in this — in the Republican primary in ’07, do you know who was winning at this time in ’07? Mitt Romney,” he told Brennan. “You know who was winning at this time in ’11? Newt Gingrich. And winning this time and ’15 was Ben Carson. I don’t remember any of those presidencies, Margaret. So, you know, my view, we can’t worry about that kind of stuff.”
Still, Trump is skipping his fourth straight debate. Instead of going to Alabama he’s holding a closed-door campaign fundraiser in Florida.
He has said he’s forgoing the primary debates because he does not want to elevate his lower-polling opponents by being onstage with them. He and his campaign have also called on the RNC to cancel the remainder of the debates and instead focus on backing him against President Joe Biden.
Though Sen. Tim Scott participated in the third debate, he dropped his presidential bid soon afterward, saying that voters “have been really clear that they’re telling me, ‘Not now, Tim.’”
On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who didn’t qualify for the third debate and wasn’t on track for the fourth — suspended his campaign, condemning “the RNC’s clubhouse debate requirements” that he argued “are nationalizing the primary process.”
He suggested recently that if he had known about the RNC’s debate thresholds before announcing his campaign, he might not have run for president.
“The amount of resources to run a national effort is very different than the resources to run in state,” Burgum said last week on a New Hampshire radio show. “And also, you’ve got a limited amount of time, as well,” noting he only entered the race in June.
Making fun of the headlines today, so you don’t have to
The news, even that about Southwest Airlines, doesn’t need to be complicated or confusing; that’s what any new release from Microsoft is for. And, as in the case with anything from Microsoft, to keep the news from worrying our pretty little heads over, remember something new and equally indecipherable will come out soon:
Really all you need to do is follow one simple rule: barely pay attention and jump to conclusions. So, here are some headlines today and my first thoughts:
A Southwest Airlines passenger climbed onto a wing.
Southwest Airlines passenger hospitalized after opening emergency exit and climbing onto wing, officials say
… Some people will do anything for extra leg room.
Moms for Liberty founder and her husband in 3-way and now battery is alleged
Oh, I’m guessing all kinds of batteries were involved.
Man who stripped naked on Disneyland ride was on drugs, police say
Ironically, he slipped himself a Mickey.
Century-overdue library book is finally returned in Minnesota
… No word if it was found with Joe Biden’s boxed papers.
Jared Leto becomes the first person to legally climb to the top of the Empire State Building
The last time he was that high, he agreed to do ‘Morbius.’
George Santos was expelled from Congress
… Saying that’s nothing compared to time he was suspended from baseball for using PEDs.
Darryl Hall broke up with John Oates
… look for a new group: John Oates and Pete Davidson!
Cyber Monday biggest on-line shopping event ever
And, now that Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday are done, let’s make way for ‘Burglary Tuesday.’
Henry Kissinger dies at 100
It probably was the vaccine.
Huge crack opens up in Iceland, steam pouring forth
… So, just another vacation for Chris Christie.
‘Oppenheimer’ bests ‘Barbie’ in weekend premiere VOD viewership
… That would explain the giant pink mushroom cloud where Barbie’s dream house used to be.
Aaron Rodgers talks Jets return this season
And says he’ll stomp his leg once if yes, twice if no.Will Smith’s team responds to accusations that the actor bottoms
Will Smith’s team responds to accusations that the actor bottoms
Damn, a ‘race to the bottom’ is now a description of people rushing to Will Smith’s house!
The Las Vegas Sphere is already losing a 100 million dollars
… Look for Elon to pay billions for it …
Paul Lander is not sure which he is proudest of — winning the Noble Peace Prize or sending Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege to accept it on his behalf, bringing to light the plight of African women in war-torn countries. In his non-daydreaming hours, Paul has written for Weekly Humorist, National Lampoon, American Bystander, Huff Post Comedy, McSweeney’s, Bombeck Writers Workshop Blog and the Humor Times, written and/or produced for multiple TV shows and written standup material that’s been performed on Maher, The Daily Show, Colbert, Kimmel, etc. Now, on to Paul’s time-commanding Special Forces in Khandahar… (See all of Paul’s “Ripping the Headlines Today” columns here.)
