Despite leading the polls with more than 60 percent, Donald Trump is apparently feeling the heat in the increasingly narrow GOP primary race, devoting the better part of Tuesday night to a TruthSocial binge dedicated to his rival, Nikki Haley.
The GOP frontrunner made a dozen posts in a handful of hours devoted to Haley, attacking her policy stances and her favorability ratings in a series of campaign posters. In another post, Trump shared a photoshopped image slapping Haley’s face onto Hillary Clinton’s body.
It’s another sign that Haley is beginning to pose a serious threat to the former president—at least from his perspective.
Earlier this month, Trump’s campaign spent some serious moolah to dismiss Haley’s potential candidacy. In one ad wielding Nazi rhetoric, a Trump-allied super PAC MAGA Inc reissued a Trump claim that immigrants are “poisoning our country” and chastised the daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants for refusing to call undocumented immigrants “illegals.”
“Illegals are criminals, Nikki. That’s what illegal means,” the ad said, slamming Haley as “too liberal” on immigration.
As of the beginning of the year, the Trump-aligned super PAC spent nearly $3.5 million in anti-Haley advertising, largely criticizing the former South Carolina governor for flip-flopping on her position over an unpopular gas tax in the state, according to a report from The Daily Beast.
Haley’s slow-burning success on the ballot poses a serious if unconventional threat for Trump, particularly as the former president contends with several states removing him from the GOP ballot entirely on the basis of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to have lost all steam from what was once predicted to be a fireball campaign against the increasingly fascist GOP favorite. As of Tuesday, Haley officially surpassed DeSantis’s waning poll numbers, barely nabbing the number two spot by a margin of .3 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight.