Trump calls Haley an ‘imposter’ who had a ‘very bad night’ in wild New Hampshire victory speech: Furious ex-president asks why Democrats were allowed to vote and insists ‘I don’t get angry, I get even’ – as crowd chants ‘birdbrain’

Donald Trump slammed Nikki Haley for staying in the Republican presidential race as he claimed victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, calling her an ‘imposter’ and claiming she had a ‘very bad night.’

‘We beat her so badly,’ he told his cheering supporters as he mocked the ‘fancy dress’ she wore to deliver a post-primary speech.

He also pointed out Haley came in third in last week’s Iowa caucuses. And he noted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who came in second in Iowa, has already left the race and endorsed him.

‘Ron beat her also. He came in second and he left. She came in third and she’s still hanging around,’ he complained.

‘In life you can’t let people get away with bulls***,’ he said. ‘You just can’t do that. When I watched her, the fancy dress, it probably wasn’t so I said, what is she doing? We won.’ 

Trump ranted in his speech despite having won the New Hampshire Republican primary and tightened his grip on the GOP presidential nomination. His supporters cheered him on, calling Haley ‘birdbrain,’ while Haley’s campaign said his ‘rant’ was proof voters wanted to move on from his ‘chaos.’

‘This is not your typical victory speech, but let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night. She had a very bad night,’ the former president said of Haley, who outperformed polls that had predicted she would lose by a wider margin.

The former president, 77, is now inching closer to a re-match with Joe Biden in the November 2024 general election after winning his second contest in the space of eight days.

The Associated Press called the race shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. ET. The victory came about a week after his win in the Iowa caucuses. Trump is the first GOP candidate in almost 50 years to sweep both contests, an indication of his iron grip on the Republican party. Meanwhile President Joe Biden won the Democratic contest despite not being on the ballot in New Hampshire.

But Trump spend the majority of his victory speech railing against Haley in comments that were a remarkable turn in tone from his Iowa speech last week, where he called for unity among Republicans.

Instead, he blamed New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu for letting Democrats vote in the Republican primary.

The majority of New Hampshire voters are independent and can vote in whichever primary they choose. State law allows voters registered to one party to switch to an independent in order to vote in either primary they like. But there was an October deadline to make the change.

Haley won independent voters on Tuesday. 

‘You have a governor who frankly doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing in this state,’ Trump complained. ‘In the Republican primary they accept Democrats too.’

‘They’re only voting because they want me to look as bad as possible, because, if you remember, we won in 2016, and if you really remember and you want to play it straight, we also won in 2020.’

He wouldn’t let up on Haley, however, calling her an ‘imposter’ who claimed victory. 

‘I said, I can go up and say to everybody, thank you for the victory, it’s wonderful, or I can go up and say, who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory? She did very poorly, actually. She had to win. The governor said she’s going to win, then she failed badly.’

Haley, in her remarks in New Hampshire, congratulated Trump on his victory but vowed to stay in the Republican presidential race. 

And her campaign said Trump’s ‘rant’ was why voters wanted an alternative choice.

‘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,’ said Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik. 

‘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.’ 

Trump wouldn’t let up on Haley, however. She had served as his ambassador to the U.N. during his presidency. 

‘I don’t get too angry , I get even,’ Trump said.

The former president also warned Haley she wouldn’t win and, if she did, she too would come under government investigations. Trump has falsely claimed to be the victim of federal witch hunt because of the court cases against him.

‘Just a little note to Nikki, she’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes,’ he said, adding ‘so would Ron [DeSantis] have been, but he decided to get out. He decided to get out.’

He finished his remarks with this: ‘We are going to win this. We have no choice. If we don’t win, I think our country is finished. I do. I believe our country is finished.’

Trump and his team have been using his victories to pressure Nikki Haley to drop out of the presidential race. 

Trump’s campaign used his victory to call on Haley to drop out, accusing her of  helping Joe Biden and Kamala Harris by staying in the race. 

‘Nikki Haley said she’s running to stop the re-election of Harris-Biden. Yet, without a viable path to victory, every day she stays in this race is another day she delivers to the Harris-Biden campaign. It’s time for unity, it’s time to take the fight to the Democrats, and for Nikki Haley: it’s time to drop out,’ said Taylor Budowich, CEO of Make America Great Again Inc., in a statement.

Haley, however, has vowed to fight on, declaring after Trump’s win that the race is ‘not over.’

‘I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory tonight. He earned it, and I want to acknowledge that. You have all heard the chatter among the political class. They are falling all over themselves, saying this race is over,’ she said at her primary night party.

‘It’s not over!,’ she declared as her supporters cheered. 

‘New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go.’

According to the CNN exit poll, Nikki Haley won ikndependents voters 61%-37% over Trump. She has used her strength among them to argue there is a strong portion of the party that wants an alternative to the former president. 

Earlier Tuesday, before polls closed, the former president shrugged it off.

‘I don’t care if she stays in. Let her do whatever she wants, it doesn’t matter,’ Trump said of Haley when he campaigned in Londonderry on Tuesday afternoon.

However, after the results came in and Haley vowed to continue, Trump took to his Truth Social account to rail against his GOP rival.

He raged in a series of post, using the all caps to make his point: ‘Haley said she had to WIN in New Hampshire. SHE DIDN’T!!!.’

‘DELUSIONAL!!!’ 

‘SHE CAME IN THIRD LAST WEEK!’ 

‘SHE JUST LOST NEVADA, WHICH IS UP NEXT!’ 

Due to a quirk in the Nevada caucus rules, on Trump and Ron DeSantis, who has already dropped out of the race, are on the ballot in that state. The next competitive race is Haley’s home state of South Carolina.  

Donald Trump Jr. argued on Monday that Haley doesn’t have a path forward and should drop out. Other Trump surrogates have also pushed for her to exit.  

‘I think we’re going to see the end of the primary, hopefully later tonight,’ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Tuesday morning as she campaigned for Trump at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester. ‘It’d be a good choice for Nikki Haley if she drops out after this election. It’s is not going to go well for her.’

And the Biden campaign used Trump’s victory to declare him the nominee.

‘Tonight’s results confirm Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination, and the election denying, anti-freedom MAGA movement has completed its takeover of the Republican Party,’ Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

‘While we work toward November 2024, one thing is increasingly clear today: Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he’ll face the only person to have ever beaten him at the ballot box: Joe Biden,’ she said.

The majority of polls closed in New Hampshire at 7 p.m. and all polls closed at 8 pm. As soon as the screens at Trump’s primary party revealed his win, his supporters went wild, chanting ‘USA, USA’ and throwing their red MAGA caps into the air.

Trump is holding his election night party at the Sheraton hotel in Nashua, N.H. Ahead of polls closing, the mood was jovial with campaign staff mingling with guests. There was an open bar and snack food. 

Eric Trump and his wife Lara joined the campaign team for dinner in the hotel restaurant.  They ran into Vivek Ramaswamy on their way out and stopped for a powpow. Kari Lake is working the press area, talking up Trump’s campaign. Former Rep. George Santos was in line at the bar. Senator Tim Scott was working the room.

Other guests took pictures in front of backdrop of flags as giant TV screens played out the cable news nets while the countdown to results was on. 

About 40% of New Hampshire’s registered voters are not affiliated by party, and they can vote in either primary. 

With Tuesday night’s win and his victory in Iowa caucuses last Monday, Trump set a new record.

He became the first Republican presidential candidate to prevail in open races in Iowa and New Hampshire since both states began leading the election calendar in 1976.

The wins show his hold on the party and casts more doubt on Haley’s ability to dent it even as an Associated Press exit poll found that more voters in New Hampshire had doubts about Trump than did voters in Iowa.

About half of New Hampshire Republican voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump is too extreme to win the general election. Only about one-third said the same about Haley. 

Trump led in the polls by double digits in the run-up to Election Day. But Haley argues there is a large swath of independent voters out there who don’t want to vote for the former president.

‘Roughly 50 percent of Republican primary voters want an alternative to Donald Trump. Seventy-five percent of the country wants an option other than Donald Trump and Joe Biden,’ her campaign wrote in a memo on Tuesday morning. 

They point to the Iowa caucuses as proof of their argument.

The 110,000 voters who participated in the 2024 Iowa caucuses accounted for just under 15% of the state’s 752,000 registered Republicans, according to the results. And it’s a far lower number than the 186,000 who came out in 2016. 

But Trump’s double wins are leading to a growing sense of inevitability that the 2024 general election will be a repeat of the 2020 contest: Trump vs. Biden. Polls show most Americans don’t want a rematch even as the country marches toward one. 

After he won the Iowa caucuses – by 30 points – former President Trump called on the Republican Party to come together behind his candidacy.

Many GOP presidential contenders bowed out of the race and endorsed him: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Trump will head west after the primary to campaign in Nevada. He’s also still dealing with the Jean Carroll defamation trial in New York.

Haley has announced she will hold a campaign event in Charleston on Wednesday, the day after New Hampshire’s primary, ahead of South Carolina’s primary. Haley’s home state holds its nominating contest in a month on February 24th.