Nikki Haley Holds Campaign Rally On Eve Of New Hampshire Primary Transcript

… and we know at the end of the day, if it’s Trump-Biden, Biden probably has this thing. And again, that would be another loss, not just in the presidency, but all the other seats that the Republicans represent. For the first time in 20 years, the polls say New Hampshire will vote Republican in the general election, but only if it’s Nikki Haley. And that’s what we want to see. That’s what we want to see. Trump gets crushed, Haley wins, and if she’s winning here, she’s winning in all those swing states and she’s coming in with a mandate, and that’s what America wants. They want that change instead of settling for these two octogenarians or whatever, we literally have a name for these guys that they’re so old at this point.

(00:39)
So whatever you guys can do to really bring that momentum, to make sure it gets out there. Now, I’ve had a lot of fun this past week. I’m not going to lie. This is the last time I get to really introduce Nikki. I’ve had so much fun on the trail, not just seeing what she does, how she interacts. We’ve gone to the breweries, we’ve gone to the hockey games, we’ve done the town halls, we’ve done everything out there. She’s wiped all the other candidates off the map in these last couple of weeks, which is amazing.

(01:06)
She’s made this thing a one-on-one race, which nobody thought was possible. She’s building on that momentum coming out of Iowa. She’s guaranteed not just a second place, but now we are just a stones throw away from doing what nobody thought was possible, and that’s delivering Donald Trump a loss in the first primary of the country. So let’s do it. Let’s get behind her. Let’s bring her out here. The next President of the United States, Miss Nikki Haley.

Oh, thank you. What a crowd, what a crowd. This is awesome. And there’s a whole nother overflow room. I think we’ve got 7 or 800 people here tonight, and we’re so excited to see you. Happy pre-election day. This is what we have been waiting for. I have been campaigning for almost a year now, touching every hand, answering every question, being the last person to leave. But I got to tell you this, there are people that come through, that you meet, that are fun friends, and then there are people that come through that you meet that are good friends. And then there are people that come through that you meet that are genuine friends. And I got to tell you, you have something special in Chris Sununu.

(02:43)
From the very beginning, before he even endorsed me, the number one thing he wanted was to move our country forward. He told us that. He told the candidates that. He said, “I want us to go in a new direction. I want to get the country back on track.” And he meant it. And then he goes and endorses me. Good job, by the way. Then he goes and endorses me, and he easily could have done a one and done, go do the speech and leave. He has literally been with me every single day, at every single event. You’re going to get to sleep soon enough. We got a little bit more to go. And not only that, he’s the coolest governor in America. He truly is.

(03:39)
So we’re excited. We are down to the election day is tomorrow. I’m excited, because it’s go time. You’re excited, because you won’t have to watch any more commercials and you won’t have to see the mail and the text messages will stop. But you know what? We’ve got a lot on the line here. We really do. And you look at what’s happening in this election.

Nikki.

Yes?

Will you marry me?

Are you going to vote for me?

I’m going to vote for Trump.

Boo.

Get out of here.

Get out of here.

Get him out.

So the one thing that has been interesting in this race is you run through, we had 13 candidates, 13 good people all wanted to go and do something right by the country. But one by one, you saw them leave. And now we have a two person race. And you’ve got one who’s got the entire political elite all around him. It’s all of Congress, it’s all these legislative people. He’s got the media elite around him. But you know what? I’ve never wanted them. Never. You go back and you look at what I first did. I was never involved in politics. And one day I was sitting with my mom in our family business telling her how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for government to fix it. And my mom said, “Don’t complain about it. Do something about it.” And I ended up, not realizing you’re not supposed to, running against the longest serving legislator in a primary in South Carolina. I never had a single endorsement, but I knew that we had way too many lawyers at the State House, and they needed a really good accountant.

(05:36)
And the people took a chance on me. And I heard Donald Trump say the other night, “All of these South Carolina elected officials are with me.” Well, the reason they’re with him is because when I was governor, I made every one of them have to start showing their votes on the record instead of hiding behind voice votes, which they were doing before. I made them pass ethics reform, which they didn’t want to do, which made it better for everybody to know they weren’t padding their pockets. I vetoed half a billion dollars of their pet projects, because that’s not where taxpayer dollars were supposed to go. So what I will say to Donald Trump is, if you had that political elite, you can have them, because that’s never who I wanted to work for. I always wanted to serve the people. And now we’re in that situation again.

(06:35)
You look at D.C. and it’s not working for us anymore. I don’t know when it started working for us. Do you know Congress has one job? One job, and that’s to give us a budget on time, and they’ve only given us a budget on time four times in 40 years. That’s it. Four times in 40 years. You know what I say to that? You don’t give us a budget on time, you shouldn’t get paid, period. You know what we’ve also said? You’re not going to see some congressional people get around me, because I think we need to have term limits in Washington D.C. I think we need to have mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75. And let me say this, I’m not being disrespectful when I say that. We all know people above the age of 75 that can run circles around us, and then we know Joe Biden.

(07:39)
These are people making decisions on our national security. These are people making decisions on the future of our economy. Congress has become the most privileged nursing home in the country. We can’t have that anymore. We’ve got to start getting our budget back on track. We are $34 trillion in debt. We’re having to borrow money just to make our interest payments. China owns some of that debt, and I would love to tell you that Biden did that to us. But I’ve always spoken in hard truths, and I’ll do that with you today. Our Republicans did that to us too. We saw when they passed that $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill with no accountability, they expanded welfare that now gives us 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps. That’s a third of our country. And Republicans and Democrats have been spending like drunken sailors ever since. We have got to stop doing that. So the way we’ll deal with it, is we’re going to start clawing back the $100 billion of unspent COVID dollars that are still out there. Instead of 87,000 IRS agents going after middle America, let’s go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of COVID fraud. One out of every $7 was spent fraudulently.

If 8% of our budget is interest, quit borrowing. Cut up the credit cards. You have to balance a budget every day. I had to balance a budget as governor. Why is Congress the only group that refuses to balance a budget? We’ll stop the spending. We’ll stop the borrowing. We’ll eliminate the pet projects, and I will veto any spending bill that doesn’t take us back to pre covid levels. That will save us trillions.

(09:24)
The second thing we’ll do is we’re going to reduce the size of the federal government. We’re going to take as many federal programs as we can and send them down to the state level. Think education, think welfare, think healthcare, think mental health. When you send all of that down without the strings, those resources go to the state and the state decides how best to use them.

(09:53)
Do you know right now we still have 70% of federal employees working from home three years after covid? But at the same time, while we have that, we also have 75% of most of our agencies sitting empty. We’re paying for that. That doesn’t make sense. We’ve got to start looking at this the right way. We have to be smart about it.

(10:18)
Then we also need to look at the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor. We need to open up the middle class. That’s why I want to eliminate the federal gas and diesel tax in this country. Let’s cut taxes on the middle class and simplify the brackets and let’s make small business tax cuts permanent. They made them temporary. They made the corporate tax cuts permanent. Small businesses are the heartbeat of our economy. We need to start acting like it.

(10:59)
For all you parents out there, we have got to get our kids reading again. Only 31% of eighth graders in our country are proficient in reading. Only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in math. If we don’t do something quick, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. That’s why we need to make sure that instead of pushing kids forward, we hold them back. We bring in their parents, we do reading remediation, and we set them up for success. We have got to get our kids reading again. As parents, we have one job, one job, and that’s to do right by our kids. That’s why there needs to be complete transparency in the classroom. We will make sure there are curriculums online so that every parent can see what their kids are being taught. We need to make sure that parents decide which school their child goes to or what mode of education they get. Parents know best. Let’s start building things in America again. Let’s put vocational classes back in our high schools. When it comes to the border, it doesn’t even look like the United States of America anymore. Regardless of what Donald Trump says, that I don’t want to secure the border, when I was governor, I passed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country. President Obama sued me over it and we won. So not only do I want to build a wall, I want to do a whole lot more than that, and that’s why we need to make sure we do a national e-verify program in this country that requires every business to prove that the people they hire are in this country legally. We want to defund sanctuary cities once and for all. No more safe havens in America. We want to put 25,000 border patrol and ICE agents on the ground and let them do their job.

(13:17)
We’ll go back to the Remain in Mexico policy so that no one steps foot on US soil to begin with, and instead of catch and release, we’ll go to catch and deport. That’s how we’ll start taking care of the border. This is one thing that should bother all of us. My parents always taught me that you take care of those who take care of you. I’m going to ask you if we’re taking care of those who take care of us. Right now in America, over 35,000 of our veterans are homeless. One in three suffers from PTSD or thoughts of suicide. We lose 22 heroes a day to suicide. If a veteran needs a doctor’s appointment, on average takes 29 days. Why 29 days? Because on the 30th day, they can go to the doctor or hospital of their choice. So midway through the 29 days, they get a call to reschedule and the clock starts all over again. It’s shameful how we treat our veterans.

(14:26)
Now, I’m the proud wife of a combat veteran. He served in Afghanistan, and when he came home to us, that was a lot of prayers answered, but that was the easy part. When we got home, life got hard. Michael couldn’t hear loud noises. He couldn’t be in crowds. Life had passed him by for the year that he was gone, and the transition was tough. We can’t just love our men and women when they’re gone. We got to love them when they come back home too. That’s why we need to do more than just the two-week transition and letting them go. We need to take care of them for the long haul. Let’s make sure that we have telehealth so they get the mental health care they need right when they need it. Let’s make sure they can go to the doctor or hospital of their choice. They have earned that right. I think the best way we take care of veteran healthcare is I think every member of Congress should have to get their healthcare from the VA, and you watch how fast that gets fixed. It’ll be the best healthcare you’ve ever seen guaranteed.

(15:52)
There were two things when I was at the United Nations that Russia, China and Iran never wanted us to have. They never wanted us to have a strong military, and they never wanted us to be energy independent. We won’t just be energy independent. We’ll be energy dominant. We will make sure we get the EPA out of the way. Right now, they care more about sagebrush lizards than they do about whether we can afford our utility bill. We’ll speed up our permitting. We’ll get our pipelines moving, including the Keystone Pipeline. We’ll export as much liquified natural gas as we can. We’ll do nuclear power. We’ll do all of the above energy approach, and we will make sure we don’t just do enough to keep America going. We’ll make sure that we turn it into an economic powerhouse that will reduce inflation and that will build up our economy.

(16:39)
But more than that, I see that we have a lot of young people in the room. I know how much you care about the environment, but I want to say this to you. We all care about the environment too. We all want clean air. We all want clean water. We all want a world that we can pass down to our kids and our grandkids, but the way you do that is not with extremes. You do it in a way that you can bring common sense and transition.

(17:19)
The first thing we need to do is call out India and China for being the big polluters that they are and hold them accountable. The second thing is you don’t demonize energy producers. You partner with the energy producers because they have the innovations that can make us go forward. They’re now doing nuclear fusion that reduces the emissions. If we work with them more, we can have more of those. But when you go to extremes by making everybody go to an electric car by 2033, you’re not thinking everything else through. Because number one, we don’t even have the infrastructure for that. I’m not talking about charging stations. These electric cars are heavy.

Heavy, our roads and bridges can’t handle it. But two, if you’re going to do it, you transition it in a way that it’s not burdensome on everything else. There’s a way to do it that’s common sense. Then let’s talk about national security. The world is on fire, literally. You’ve got a war in Europe, you’ve got a war in the Middle East. You’ve got North Korea testing, intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting the US. You’ve got China on the march. But make no mistake, none of that would’ve happened had we not had that debacle in Afghanistan.

(18:46)
The idea that my husband and his military brothers and sisters who served there had to watch us leave Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night without telling our allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades because we asked them to be there. Think about what that told our friends. More importantly, think about what that told our enemies. Now, I want to tell you, I just saw a very good friend come into this room. To call him a hero would be an understatement. To call his wife a hero would be an understatement, because this man who’s a good, strong patriot, didn’t just serve in Afghanistan once.

(19:33)
He served in Afghanistan 10 times. General Bolduc, stand up and let everybody applaud you. The General and Sharon were the first ones to come out and endorse me. The first ones to say that “We want to help you. We want to do something about it.” He’s as conservative as they get. Then you have Chris Sununu, who’s a moderate. But the point is, we’ve got everybody and we’ve got the real people who love America. That’s what we’re trying to do. But I’m forever grateful to both of you for your friendship, your support, and everything you’ve done along the way. Thank you.

(20:39)
While we have these wars that we’re talking about, the one thing we should be talking about is our number one national security threat, is China. China’s been planning war with us for years, and that’s not an exaggeration. They’ve already infiltrated our country. We know that because they bought 400,000 acres of US soil most recently near Grand Forks Air Force Base, where our most sensitive drone technology is. They put millions of dollars into our universities, stealing our research, spreading Chinese propaganda. Everybody got upset about the Chinese spy balloon, right? Rightfully so. Now, we know it connected with an internet company here in America, picked up the surveillance and sent it to China. But did you know that 90% of our law enforcement drones are Chinese? That we have Chinese police stations throughout our country? That there’s a Chinese spy base off our shores in Cuba?

(21:38)
What about the fact that we have had more Americans die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars combined? China’s building up their military at a scary pace. They now have 500 nuclear warheads, that’s a hundred more than they had last year. They have 370 ships. They’ll have 400 ships in two years. We won’t even have 350 ships in two decades. They’re doing artificial intelligence, they’re doing space, they’re doing cyber. They’re doing hypersonic missiles. We’ve barely gotten started. Now, China’s the lead developer of neuro-strike weapons. Weapons engineered to change the brain activity of military commanders and segments of the population. That’s who we’re dealing with. Don’t let Joe Biden tell you that China’s a competitor. I dealt with China every single day at the United Nations. They never saw us as a competitor. They always saw us as an enemy. We’ve got to look at them the way they look at us. But you don’t do that by putting your head in the sand, and you don’t do that in fear. The way we’ll deal with it is the first thing we do is stop selling them any US soil, and let’s take back the land they already purchased.

(22:59)
We’ll go to our universities and we’ll say, “You either take foreign money or you take American money. But the days of taking both are over.” We get that foreign intrusion out of our schools. We make sure that we tell China that we’re going to end all normal trade relations with them until they stop murdering Americans. You watch how fast they move. They need our economy, and then we build up our military so that it’s strong, strong militaries. Don’t start wars. Strong militaries prevent wars.

(23:38)
When I tell you my husband is in the military, for any military families, you know the last thing you ever want for your loved one, go to war. Our job is to prevent war. Our job is national security. Our job is to protect Americans. You don’t do that by throwing more money at the Department of Defense. You actually clean it up. You pull down the red tape, you get rid of the bureaucracy. You stop playing favorites with defense contractors and you modernize. We’ve got too many generals focusing on old wars, land, air, and sea. What we need to be focused on cyber, artificial intelligence, space, hypersonic missiles, submarines. That’s what we need to focus on.

(24:23)
But we know how to do this. I’ll do it the same way I did at the UN. When I went to the United Nations, I told countries what America was for and what America was against. I didn’t care if they didn’t like me, but I wanted them to respect America. That’s how we will get it back on track. We know what we need to do domestically, and we know what we need to do from a national security lens.

(24:46)
But now we’ve got to talk about some hard truths for Republicans. Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans, but the only way we’re going to do that is if we elect a new generational conservative leader.

That’s Nikki.

Now, here’s another hard truth, my truth. I voted for Donald Trump twice. I was proud to serve America in his administration, but rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. You know I’m right. Chaos follows him. We can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos because we won’t survive it. We also want someone who can win in November. You look at any of these general election polls, any of them, Trump and Biden, it’s a dead heat. It’s going to be a nail biter of an election. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re scared that it’ll be 2018, 2020, 2022 all over again. I’m in every one of those same general election polls, and I defeat Biden by up to 17 points. Donald Trump said that that was a dirty poll. He didn’t realize that was his own pollster that did that poll for the Wall Street Journal. Look what I’m saying with the 17 points, you win by double digits. Do you know what that means? That’s bigger than the presidency because you go into DC with a mandate, a mandate to stop the wasteful spending and get our economy back on track. A mandate to get our kids reading again and go back to the basics with education, a mandate to

… to secure our borders. No more excuses. A mandate for law and order in this country, and a mandate for a strong America that we can all be proud of. Don’t you want that?

Yes. We want Nikki.

Because we could have that. But in order to do that, it’s going to take a lot of courage. Courage from everyone in this room and in the overflow room.

Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki. Nikki.

Thank you. Courage for me to run and courage for every one of you to know, don’t complain about what happens in a general election if you don’t go vote tomorrow. Now, I have seen the commercials that you have seen and I have seen the mail that you have gotten, and I want to tell you, every single one of those commercials by Donald Trump is a lie. Check the fact checkers, I never once said I was going to cut Social Security. I never once said I was going to raise the retirement age for anybody that was in the system. I never once increased taxes, even though he said I did. Not once did I do that.

(28:38)
I never once said I don’t want a border wall. I said I want a border wall and then some. And I never once… He can say it all he wants. I’m not a warmonger. You are not the wife of a combat veteran and be someone who wants war. We are the opposite. We don’t want war. But I’ll say this, if you’ve got a lie to win, you don’t deserve to win. It’s that simple. But let’s look at what your options are as you go to vote tomorrow. This really is an option. Do you want more of the same?

No. We want Nikki.

Or do you want to go forward? 70% of Americans have said they don’t want a Trump Biden rematch. The majority of Americans disprove of both Biden and Trump. Trump and Biden put us trillions of dollars in debt that our kids are never going to forgive us for. Everybody talks about what a good economy we had under Trump. We did, but at what cost? He put us $8 trillion in debt in just four years. That’s not how you fix an economy. You don’t run up the credit card to do it. And then are we really going to say that we’re okay with having our options be two 80-year-olds that weren’t for president? I’m not being disrespectful. I’m saying we need somebody with eight years. They can’t do that. We need Russia, China and Iran to be on their heels. They need to know that somebody’s at the top of their game. So we have these options.

(30:25)
The reason this matters to me is because six months ago I dropped my husband off at 4:00 A.M. for another year-long deployment, and I watched 10 and 230 soldiers pick up their two duffel bags of belongings to go to a country they’ve never been all in the name of protecting America. They’re willing to sacrifice their lives and their families because they still believe in this amazing experiment that is America. So if they’re willing to sacrifice for us there, shouldn’t we be willing to fight for our country here? Because we have a country to save. We have a country to save and we have the opportunity to savor. Someone asked me why I was running and I said my parents came here 50 years ago to an America that was strong and proud and full of opportunities. I want them to know that country again. I’m doing this for my husband Michael and his military brothers and sisters. I want them to know their sacrifice matters. I want them to know that we love our country.

(31:43)
I’m doing this for my daughter who’s here today. And my son-in-law. And when they got married, I saw how hard it was for them to buy a home. The average home buyer in America now is 49 years old. The American Dream’s leaving them. And I’m doing this for my son who’s a senior in college and I’m tired of watching him struggle to write papers of things he doesn’t believe in just to get an A. That’s not us, that’s not America. And for the first time, 81% of Americans don’t think their kids are going to have as good of a life as we did. We can’t be okay with that. I’m not okay with that. We do have a country to save, but I’ll promise you this, if you join with me in this movement, if you go to the polls tomorrow and take five people with you and you commit to getting us back on track, I will spend every single day proving to you that you made a good decision. Thank you very much. God bless you.