‘She didn’t win, she lost’: Seething Trump takes aim at Nikki Haley after his New Hampshire victory

The lady is not for turning. Nor are the Republican voters. After a year of on-and-off campaigning in the diners and schools of New Hampshire, Nikki Haley congratulated Donald Trump on winning the state primary just 20 minutes after the last polling stations closed, incurring the wrath of her rival as she vowed to remain in the US presidential race.

“I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory tonight. He’s earned it and I want to acknowledge that. Now, you’ve all heard the chatter among the political class. They are falling all over themselves saying this race is over. Well I have news for all of them,” she told a raucous gathering at her campaign headquarters in Concord. The supporters cheered and waved their Haley placards. The mood was defiant.

“New Hampshire is first in the nation; it is not last in the nation. There are dozens of states to go and the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina,” she said, injecting a bit of country into the close.

“Seething” was the only word to describe Donald Trump when he took to the stage an hour later, in Nashua, to celebrate his win. His progression through this Republican campaign has been remarkable, sweeping Iowa and now New Hampshire even as he engaged in a series of court appearances and the death of an in-law.

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His putative rivals had melted faster than the snow that gripped the northern states over the past fortnight. Haley’s stubbornness got under the skin of the former president to the extent that he critiqued her concession speech rather than deliver his own.

“Then someone ran up to the stage all dressed up nicely when it was at 7 [percentage points of a difference]. But now I just looked up and it is at 14. We have to do what is good for the party. She is doing a speech like she won. She didn’t win. She lost. Last week we had a little bit of a problem and if you remember Ron was very upset because she ran up and pretended she won Iowa. And I looked around, I said: didn’t she come in third? Yeah, she came in third.”

Repeating the fiction that he won the 2020 election in New Hampshire, Trump invited on to the stage Vivek Ramaswamy, who had positioned himself as a younger, lovable incarnation of Trump during his own candidacy. He immediately endorsed Trump after suspending his campaign in Iowa and spent Tuesday morning making conspicuous appearances at carefully selected venues in New Hampshire.

One of his first stops of the day was at the Red Arrow Diner, the beloved century-old institution on Manchester’s Lowell Street that has become an obligatory coffee-and-burger stop for presidential hopefuls down the years.

On Tuesday evening, a late voter could have stopped in for a bite and discovered that the 2024 primary was done and dusted before their dinner was served. As the vote counting continued across the state, Ramaswamy accepted Trump’s invitation to address the room and voice his indignation – ”in a minute or less” – at Haley’s refusal to step aside.

“What we see right now with her continuing in this race is the underbelly of American politics where the mega donors are trying to do one thing where we the people say another,” he said.

With 96 per cent of votes counted, the former president was on 54.4 per cent to Haley’s 43.3 per cent. More significantly, exit polls suggested that some 74 per cent of registered Republicans had voted for Trump. Of that number, 73 per cent responded that Trump would be fit for the presidency if convicted of a crime, while 25 per cent responded that he would not.

Hours before the counting was concluded, President Joe Biden issued a statement saying it was apparent Trump would be his Republican rival in the general election and reiterated his warning about a threat to democracy.

The margin of defeat will leave Haley and her strategists and donors mulling over her reluctance to amplify her fears and bleak projections over another Biden-Trump general election earlier, and more forcefully. Once more, she used the moment to offer a warning of a near-inevitable return to the poisonous election climate of four years ago.

“Our country is in a real mess,” she said, with feeling.

“With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate. We lost the House. We lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. And we lost in 2022. The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump. They know he is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat.

“You can’t fix the mess if you don’t win an election. A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency. The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”

And on an evening laden with statistical data, perhaps the most breathtaking number of the night was mentioned in passing on CNN: the observation that at 77, Bill Clinton is younger than the two men who will campaign for the White House.

Haley is for now clinging to a belief that she can divert that river. None of this will endear her to Trump, whose reclamation of the Republican power base looks complete as far as this nomination race goes.

Haley has a month to prepare to put her popularity in South Carolina to the vote. But by then all the placards and Haley paraphernalia even now consigned to attics all over New Hampshire may belong to the historical detritus of another doomed presidential nomination campaign. New Hampshire is, after all, a museum of such artefacts.

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