Former president Donald Trump ripped into former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley on Friday after a recent poll showed her approaching him in terms of support in the crucial early primary state of New Hampshire.
“Fake New Hampshire poll was released on Birdbrain,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform, referring to Haley using the epithet he coined for her earlier in the campaign.
“Just another scam! Ratings challenged FoxNews will play it to the hilt. Sununu now one of the least popular governors in US,” Trump added, referring to the poll, which was released by Fox News, and to Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley for the Republican nomination last week and suggested Trump’s return would result in “chaos and distraction” reigning in America.
Recent polling by the American Research Group, a New Hampshire-based market research company, found Trump leading among Republicans in the Granite State by just four percentage points – 33 percent against 29 percent for Haley, with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy rounding out the top five with 13, 6 and 5 percent, respectively.
A Haley campaign spokesperson immediately pounced on the poll, suggesting it’s the clearest indication yet that “this is a two-person race” between Trump and his former UN ambassador.
National polling seems to suggest otherwise, with DeSantis consistently polling second behind Trump, narrowly ahead of Haley, despite a series of endorsements from Wall Street and even some Democrats for the former South Carolina governor.
In his social media rant Friday, Trump posted an alternative poll by InteractivePolls, showing him leading in New Hampshire with a comfortable 52 percent, compared to 22 percent for Haley and 10 percent for DeSantis.
Friday’s ‘Birdbrain’ comments follows a return to classic election season Trump earlier this month as the Republican primaries and caucuses near. On December 9, the former president went after with “high heels” wearing “bobble head” DeSantis, called former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson “dead,” and ridiculed Chris Christie as a physically and mentally unfit basket case suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome at levels not seen before.”
Trump’s surge in the polls comes despite (or perhaps because of) four separate criminal cases leveled against him in New York, Washington, DC, Florida and Georgia ranging from the falsification of business records to pay off a porn star, to the mishandling of classified documents, to an alleged plot to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.
New Hampshire Republicans will go to the polls in the GOP presidential primaries on January 23, preceded only by Iowans, who will hold a presidential caucus on January 15.