With five days left until the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump and his allies are stepping up their efforts to muscle Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis out of the Republican presidential race by casting Trump’s nomination as inevitable.
The strategy reflects an urgent desire to end the race quickly and avoid an extended and expensive battle for delegates heading into Super Tuesday on March 5.
Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, as well as two costly civil trials, where he has used voluntary appearances at New York courthouses this month as public relations and fundraising vehicles. But February offers him few such opportunities, meaning he would need to rely on his political strength alone to generate momentum for Super Tuesday, when voters in 16 states and territories will cast ballots for the nomination.
In New Hampshire, Trump began attacking Haley with paid advertising weeks ago, and intensified the onslaught more recently with sharper personal criticisms and campaign statements portraying her as a China-loving globalist. On Tuesday, he went after Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, on his social media website, using her birth name — Nimarata, which he misspelled as “Nimrada” — as a dog whistle, much like his exaggerated enunciation of former President Barack Obama’s middle name, “Hussein.”
And he has grown more aggressive on the campaign trail. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Wednesday night, he said of Haley, “I don’t know that she’s a Democrat, but she’s very close. She’s far too close for you.”
But his team is looking ahead to the South Carolina primary Feb. 24 as a “Waterloo” for his primary rivals, according to one Trump adviser, likening the state to the battlefield where Napoleon met his final defeat. Their aim is to humiliate her in her home state.
“South Carolina is where Nikki Haley’s dreams go to die,” another senior Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, said in a brief interview.
Trump has been privately courting Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, hoping to win his endorsement before the primary. Trump allies who have relationships with Scott, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have been assisting the effort.
Republicans across the country, including senators who were previously skeptical of Trump, are assisting his strategy by consolidating their support, rushing to declare the race over, rolling out endorsements and demanding that his rivals quit immediately to “unify” the party against President Joe Biden.
Their efforts are being aided by the conservative news media, which has turned sharply against DeSantis after giving his candidacy favorable coverage early on.
The inevitability strategy also appears to be bearing fruit within the business community. On Wednesday morning, one of Wall Street’s most powerful CEOs, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase — who as recently as November urged donors to “help Nikki Haley” — praised aspects of Trump’s record and scolded Democrats for vilifying the former president’s Make America Great Again movement.
Haley and DeSantis both insist their campaigns are alive and well, with plans to compete deep into March. But the reality is that a comeback victory would represent one of the greatest upsets in modern American political history. That would be especially true if Trump wins New Hampshire, since no Republican who has won two of the first three traditional early states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — has ever lost the party’s nomination.
Haley finished a disappointing third in Monday’s Iowa caucuses but is facing what polls suggest is more favorable terrain in New Hampshire, where unaffiliated voters can cast ballots in the primary and where her allies argue even a close second could provide a rationale to stay in the race. Even there, however, she needs a large turnout of unaffiliated voters to overcome Trump’s overwhelming backing from Republicans.
“She basically has to turn the Republican primary into the unaffiliated primary,” LaCivita, the senior Trump adviser, said of the state.
Haley’s path to a competitive race seems more visible than DeSantis’, but only barely: She must win the New Hampshire primary Tuesday or come in a very close second, and ride a wave of media momentum for a month before tackling Trump head-on in the state she used to govern, South Carolina, where he has a huge lead and endorsements from powerful politicians there, including the governor.
In New Hampshire, the Trump campaign is trying to engage what one adviser called a “pincer” — squeezing Haley from both ends of the ideological spectrum. An advertising campaign began lacing into her on immigration (hitting her from the right) before criticizing her for wanting to raise the retirement age for Social Security (hitting her from the left).
Haley is trying to portray Trump and Biden as two of the same: Disliked elderly politicians who are exacerbating chaos and division in America. It’s a message tailored for independent voters who have tired of Trump, but the message will most likely have far less purchase among Republican voters.
While Haley is courting independent voters in New Hampshire, it’s harder to see how a Republican candidate can win a Republican nomination without much stronger support from Republicans.
On Wednesday, Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, rejected the notion that Haley’s strategy was to rely on independent and crossover Democratic voters to make up for softer support among Republicans.
Ankney said the strategy has always been to do well in New Hampshire, roll out with momentum into South Carolina and then go head-to-head against Trump on Super Tuesday, when independents have historically made a difference in open or semi-open primaries, including in 2016 for Trump.
Polls showing Trump far ahead in Texas and other Super Tuesday states should not be taken seriously, Ankney insisted, because “people have not started to pay attention” in those states and “there has been zero advertising.” The Haley campaign is optimistic that she can perform especially strongly in March states that have larger populations of college-educated voters, including Virginia.
Trump’s team is far less worried about DeSantis, who finished in second place in Iowa just 2 points ahead of Haley, but who is far behind in New Hampshire. The Trump team suspects DeSantis will struggle to keep his candidacy financially afloat long enough to compete seriously on Super Tuesday.
The DeSantis path beyond February is murky — a fact reflected by the pro-DeSantis super political action committee’s decision Wednesday to lay off staff in some of its March 5 states. But the DeSantis team insists the candidate has no plans to drop out before South Carolina.
A majority of DeSantis’ staff is moving to South Carolina, and he will mostly stop campaigning in New Hampshire after his events Wednesday, according to a person familiar with his plans, who insisted on anonymity.
The fact that South Carolina was his first stop after Iowa was described as an intentional signal about his electoral calculations.
On a staff call after Iowa, DeSantis’ campaign manager, James Uthmeier, described DeSantis’ view: The caucuses showed that Trump doesn’t have the standing he once did after getting just over 50%, and that Republicans want an alternative, according to people familiar with what was said.
DeSantis’ advisers remain furious at the Haley camp’s decision to spend more than $20 million attacking DeSantis on television ads before Iowa, which a top aide publicly described as “greed” before the caucuses and insisted was meant to help Trump. The DeSantis team has openly accused Haley of campaigning to become Trump’s running mate and not to win, a claim that she has denied.
Another element of Trump’s inevitability messaging is his growing discussion of possible personnel for a second term. Trump, who out of superstition has long avoided discussing who might serve in his administration, has begun indulging discussions of who might serve alongside him.
At his Iowa victory party Monday night, Trump brought onstage Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who had ended his own presidential campaign and endorsed the front-runner. Trump told the audience that he had Burgum pegged for an important role in his administration.
Another former rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, immediately dropped out after the caucuses, endorsed Trump and urged all other candidates to do the same. As he appeared onstage with Trump at a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, on Tuesday night, Trump grinned broadly as the crowd chanted, “VP, VP, VP.”
“He’ll be working with us for a long time,” Trump said. It was a whiplash reversal that’s typical of Trump. Two days earlier, he had attacked Ramaswamy as “not MAGA.”
Such rapid consolidation of the party behind Trump has visibly frustrated DeSantis and his allies, given that less than a year ago there was a moment when it seemed as if Republicans might be ready to move on and coalesce around the Florida governor.
No defection was more emblematic of the shift than that of Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Lee was an early booster of DeSantis’ presidential run and had met with the governor to discuss policy, according to a person with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings.
Lee did not give DeSantis a heads up before he announced that he was endorsing Trump just three days before the Iowa caucuses, that person said. The DeSantis team saw the timing as a knife in the back.
Dan Hauser, a campaign adviser to Lee, said in a statement that the senator didn’t call any candidate in the race before he endorsed Trump.
In another personal twist, Lee’s wife, Sharon, had worked for the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down. She left the group “a couple of months ago on her own terms,” according to Hauser.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.