But now it was time to train Trump’s full arsenal of attacks on the woman who had previously served as his U.N. ambassador and would prove the last Republican standing between him and his party’s nomination.
During a Saturday rally in downtown Manchester, Trump used a giant projector screen behind him to display sign after sign attacking Haley as his crowd roared its booing disapproval at the mere mention of her name. In what senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described as a “pincer” movement, Trump bombarded Haley from both ideological sides — falsely claiming she would kill Social Security benefits and did not support his border wall.
“NIKKI HALEY IS LOVED BY DEMOCRATS, WALL STREET & GLOBALISTS,” the screen blared above his head.
By Sunday, two days before the primary, it was clear Trump’s heavy artillery strategy against the former South Carolina governor was working. Trump’s edge in New Hampshire was growing and the momentum that Haley had hoped to use to help her make up ground in her home state of South Carolina was slipping from her grasp.
Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, was clear-eyed about the challenges of taking on a de facto incumbent with a fanatical following, describing the task as daunting but possible.
“He is a juggernaut,” Ankney acknowledged at a lunch hosted by Bloomberg News over the weekend. “But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
On Tuesday, the juggernaut rolled on. The New Hampshire voters who could have lifted Haley to victory instead chose Trump and made her long-shot bid even longer. Haley had performed better than predicted by some pre-election polling, but it was a decisive loss nonetheless.
The results could represent the last gasps of the efforts to stop Trump, who barreled closer to locking down the Republican nomination after winning just a couple hundred thousand votes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Haley’s campaign insists that as many as a dozen remaining states — including Michigan and many of those that cast ballots in the Super Tuesday contests March 5 — offer “fertile ground” for Haley, because they are open or semi-open primaries where independents are allowed to vote. She is launching a $4 million ad buy in all seven of South Carolina’s media markets, and has a rally planned in Charleston on Wednesday evening.
“We aren’t going anywhere,” Ankney wrote in a Tuesday memo.
But the outcome here was the culmination of a guarded candidate who was reluctant to fully engage with voters and the media, and whose tight, streamlined stump speech offered prescriptions for multiple problems — but without a clear sense of what her top priorities would be.
Haley was also hesitant to take on Trump directly, caught between the competing imperatives of turning out the state’s undeclared voters without alienating core Republicans who still like the former president. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, seized on her cautious approach, using the vacuum to define her to voters.
“She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint,” LaCivita said.
Haley headed Wednesday to her home state of South Carolina, where her campaign says she is poised for a strong performance in the Feb. 24 primary. But polls show Trump beating Haley by double digits in a state that includes a deeply conservative and…
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