Former president Donald Trump celebrated his New Hampshire primary win in Nashua Tuesday night by delivering an angry tirade against “impostor” Nikki Haley and the Granite State governor who endorsed her.
In a dramatic about face from the sunny calls for party unity in his Iowa victory speech last week, Trump ripped into Haley for having the temerity to announce that the GOP primary is just beginning, even after losing to the former president in New Hampshire.
“She’s doing a speech like she won, but she didn’t win, she lost,” Trump said of Haley, who delivered her own speech earlier on Tuesday putting a positive spin on her loss.
With 34 percent of votes counted, Trump led 53.4 percent to Haley’s 45.5 percent.
Trump went on to say she had done the same thing last week in Iowa, when she declared the race had narrowed into a two-person contest, despite having come in third place behind Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who later dropped out of the race and endorsed the former president.
“We beat her so badly,” he said. “You know, Ron came in second and he left. She came in third and she’s still hanging around.”
“This is not your typical victory speech but let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night,” he added.
Haley’s campaign hit back in a statement on Tuesday night decrying his “angry rant.”
“Two states have now voted in the presidential race, and Donald Trump barely received half of the vote – not exactly a ringing endorsement for a former president demanding a coronation,” Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik said. “His angry rant was filled with grievances and offered the American people nothing about his vision for our country’s future. This is why so many voters want to move on from Trump’s chaos and are rallying to Nikki Haley’s new generation of conservative leadership.”
Flanked by also-rans Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Tim Scott, both of whom have endorsed him since dropping out of the race, Trump also took shots at New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu.
“You have the now very unpopular governor of this state,” Trump said, “This guy he’s got to be on something.”
He then slammed Sununu for presiding over an open primary in which independents are allowed to participate.
Trump also repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election.
“We also won in 2020 by more and we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016, but as they said we lost by a whisker, just by a whisker,” he said. “But we can’t let that happen. You have to have people that speak up.”
“I can go up and I can say thank you for the victory or I can go up and say who the Hell was the imposter who went up on the stage before and claimed a victory,” he went on to say, adding that Haley “did very poorly” and “failed badly.”
He took shots at President Biden as well, saying he has beaten Biden in many polls but added, “Who the Hell can’t? The man can’t put two sentences together. He can’t find the stairs off the stage.”
The speech echoed similar messages Trump posted on Truth Social earlier on Thursday.
“Haley said she had to WIN in New Hampshire. SHE DIDN’T!!!” he wrote. “DELUSIONAL!!!” he added in a separate post.
The Associated Press called the race for Trump just after 8 p.m., moments after the last polling precincts closed.
Haley addressed her supporters 20 minutes later and congratulated Trump on his win.
She said he had “earned it, and I want to acknowledge that.”
Haley attempted to put a positive spin on her loss, saying she had won “close to half the vote” and is rising in the polls, despite the political class “falling all over themselves saying this race is over.”
“I have news for them. New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not last in the nation,” she said. “This race is far from over.”
She noted the GOP has lost the House, the Senate, and the White House with Trump as its leader.
“The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump,” Haley said. She said Trump would lose to Biden, but she would beat him “handily.”
“With Donald Trump you have one bout of chaos after another,” Haley said. “This court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment. You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.”
Despite Haley’s optimism, her future in the race appears all-but-doomed as New Hampshire, with its more moderate base and open primary, had been seen as her last chance to thwart Trump’s rapid march to the nomination.