Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stated on Friday that she disagrees with former President Donald Trump’s recent comment calling his political opponents “vermin.”
“The reality is I don’t agree with that statement any more than I agree when he said Hezbollah was smart or when he hit Netanyahu when his country was on its knees after all that brutality,” Haley said at a town hall in Newton, Iowa.
“It’s the craziness of it all, right? The guy has good intentions, I assure you. But the turmoil has got to stop,” she concluded.
The statements by Haley come as the former UN ambassador seeks the Republican nominee for president and seeks to set herself apart from her former boss. Trump has ramped up his rhetoric and attacked with greater ferocity in recent weeks, despite maintaining a sizable advantage.
This past weekend, Trump gave a rally in New Hampshire, telling the crowd, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” and adding, “the real threat is not from the radical right.” The radical left is where the actual danger is, and it’s expanding.
On Friday, an audience member asked Haley what she thought “about that kind of language” coming from the GOP.
Haley began her response by saying she had a “good working relationship” with Trump but that she frequently cautioned him on what not to say.
“And one of the things I would always tell him is that you can be your own worst enemy,” she added.
According to the latest AWN polls, Haley is quickly rising to become one of Trump’s most formidable opponents. In the early primary states of South Carolina and New Hampshire, where the former president enjoys majority support, Haley has surpassed Trump’s other challengers and now stands in second place.
President Joe Biden, who is running for reelection himself, has also recently spoken out against Trump’s comment. Biden told fundraisers at an event in San Francisco earlier this week that the former president’s use of the word “vermin” is “language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 30s,” and suggested that Trump will use the presidency for “revenge and retribution” if elected again.
In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Haley called the Republican Party’s recent electoral losses “chaos” and insisted that it “got to start focusing.”
So, it’s not really about Donald Trump, and no, he doesn’t have the same kind of personality that I do. And yeah, he does say inappropriate things. We are currently projecting an air of total disinterest. The globe is less secure when the United States is preoccupied, she said.
