In remarks sure to raise the eyebrows of opportunistic media and political foes, former President Donald Trump pulled no punches Saturday against Republican primary rival Nikki Haley, even going as far as to ask "where's her husband?"
Haley's husband is voluntarily serving a year-long deployment for the U.S. National Guard in Africa, but Trump boldly went there Saturday in Conway, South Carolina, Haley's home state.
"Where's her husband?" Trump said in his speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the Newsmax2 streaming platform. "Oh, he's away. He's away.
"What happened to her husband? Where is he? He's gone. He knew."
Haley shot back in an X post Saturday night, using an infamous – albeit disputed – attack on Trump being insensitive to service members.
"Michael is deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about," Haley wrote in rebuke. "Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief."
President Joe Biden recently attacked Trump for having called World War II victims "suckers" — a claim that Trump has long denied, but Haley has now repeated.
But, in this moment, Trump was assailing Haley's lack of loyalty in not only not endorsing him for president but running against him and refusing to end her primary campaign against the longest of odds and poor polling numbers.
"'I will never run against President Trump: He is a great president, the greatest president in my lifetime,'" Trump said, quoting Haley's past remarks for her former boss that installed her as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration.
"'The greatest president in my lifetime,' she said. 'I will never run against him.' Then she comes over to see me at Mar-a-Lago: 'Sir, I will never run against you.' She brought her husband."
But that is where Trump stopped to ask where he is amid her presidential campaign, suggesting he should be by her side instead of volunteering now for the National Guard in Africa.
Trump attacked Haley from a few different angles during the speech at Coastal Carolina University on Saturday night.
"By the way, Birdbrain loves mass asylum," Trump said, using his derisive nickname for her, adding, "there's nothing nice about her."
Trump has long rebuked Haley for disloyalty in running for president against him, adopting the Gov. Ron DeSantis campaign moniker of "Tricky Nikki."
"We don't need people like this," Trump said. "And I'll tell you what, she did a job. She was fine. She was OK. But I didn't put her there because I wanted her there at the United Nations. That was up to me. I wanted to take your lieutenant governor, who's right here and make him governor. That's what I wanted."
That is current South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who has endorsed Trump.
"He believed in me," Trump said.
Haley is going to rely Democrats and their wealthy donors – as she sought to do in New Hampshire – to try to close a 40- to 50-point gap in South Carolina GOP primary polling, according to Trump.
"Democrats want Nikki Haley because they know that she's easy to beat," Trump said. "She's very easy to beat. Haley supports a 23% national sales tax, and she wants to gut Medicare and Social Security and raise the retirement age of Social Security by 10 years.
"Anybody getting ready for the Social Security? Would you mind? That's not going to have much of an impact, right? She just added 10 years."
Trump also alleged Haley was once too eager to welcome Chinese investment in the state of South Carolina.
"She gave land away in your state – she gave land away, as you know, to China," Trump warned.
Trump also criticized Haley's foreign policy positions as that of both a "globalist" and a "warmonger."
"Haley is the candidate of globalists and warmongers who want to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on endless war," Trump said. "She's always in favor of fighting wars."
Trump surrogates have been actively urging Haley to end her GOP primary campaign, because they allege she has no path to victory and will merely burn up finite Republican donor dollars before November's general election.
"Nikki [Haley] may have started her career in South Carolina, but she's now 100% the candidate of Wall Street and the war machine," Trump concluded.
"She wants to go to war with everybody. She wants to kill people. Kill people [in] countries that don't want us there."
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