The US presidential elections for 2024 are now one step closer to getting a replay of Biden versus Trump. Former US president Donald Trump has scored a big victory in the New Hampshire primary, leaving his last credible Republican rival Nikki Haley far behind.
According to The Independent, “with less than 20 per cent of results in by 8pm [local time], Mr Trump had clearly won the Republican primary with 54 per cent of the vote so far”.
Though Trump now looks set to get the Republican nomination for the presidential elections, Haley is determined to stay in the race. Haley’s campaign has also slammed what it calls Trump’s lies about her.
Before the New Hampshire primary, Haley had put up a video on Instagram on what she said was Trump lying about her. The accompanying post read: “Desperate politicians do desperate things…and Donald Trump is desperate to stop our momentum. That’s why he and his team are spending millions of dollars to lie about me and my record.”
“If you have to lie to win, you don’t deserve to win,” said the post by Haley. The punchline of the video was: “Trump can’t stop lying.”
One of the things that Trump reportedly said about Haley was that she had no eligibility to run for the US presidential elections.
A January 2024 report in The Guardian said: “A leading professor of US constitutional law condemned Donald Trump for ‘playing the race card’ by propagating the ‘totally baseless’ claim that Nikki Haley, his surging rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is not qualified because her parents were not US citizens when she was born.”
House speaker asks Republicans to back Trump
Such disputes aside, Trump looks all set to trump Haley as the party nominee, even though several primaries are still to come, including South Carolina (on February 3, 2024), where Haley was governor.
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has called upon party members to give their support to Trump. “Our House Republican leaders and a majority of Republican Senators support his re-election, and Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have strongly backed him at the polls. It’s now past time for the Republican Party to unite around President Trump so we can focus on ending the disastrous Biden presidency and growing our majority in Congress,” said the speaker, in a statement.
Trump himself repeated his own earlier outrageous statements, claiming that he had won the 2020 elections, which he actually lost to Democrat leader Joe Biden, the current President of the United States.
He said at New Hampshire, “We won in 2016. And if you really remember, if you want to play it straight, we also won in 2020, by more…. And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016.”
Heaping scorn on his party rival Haley, he said, “We’ve won almost every single poll in the last three months against crooked Joe Biden, almost… and she doesn’t win those polls.”