Nikki Haley Takes Aim at Trump’s Electability at Rally in New Hampshire Transcript

I’ll give you that.

All right. All right. Wow. Good to see everybody. We have a packed house today, yet another packed house as we crisscross the state. You guys excited? You should be. This is the first-in-the-nation primary. The whole country is absolutely watching. There’s energy, there’s excitement. I mean, look at this room. It’s just really great. And so as you guys know, Nikki has been crisscrossing all over the state. She’s been going to diners and restaurants and breweries and town halls and rallies and all this kind of stuff. And everywhere she goes, the momentum builds and builds as we get closer and closer to Tuesday.

(00:34)
We’re going to bring her out in two seconds. The big message for myself, for everybody is get out to vote, get out to vote, get out to vote, right? No matter what happens, the more people we get out, the more people we bring to the table gives us a real chance to do something nobody thought was possible. We always wanted to make this a two-person race. We did it. We always wanted Nikki to come out stronger in New Hampshire than she was in Iowa. We’re going to do that. We’re going to give her a lot of momentum going into South Carolina. And if we can pull something off that none of those folks in the back, none of the media thought was possible and actually beat Donald Trump and reset this whole election for the country, that would just be the cherry on top. That would be incredible. That would be incredible.

(01:14)
Secretary Scanlan said that we’re going to have record turnout on the Republican side. That’s exciting. The weather is going to be really, really good. I promise. I’m a politician. I never promise anything and don’t come through, right? But there is a lot of excitement, so I’m quite serious in terms of you guys are here, you get it, right? But talk to your family, talk to your friends, talk to your coworkers, talk to the weird uncles, the crazy cousins. Bring your pets. I don’t care. We all got to get out to vote on Tuesday because, as we said, there’s really an opportunity here. Everybody’s watching, which is pretty cool. I’m going to bring out someone. Before we bring Nikki out, I want to bring out someone who has really got behind Nikki, really had the idea to make this happen. A huge family history here. Let’s hear it. He’s not gone yet. He’s still around. The great Congressman Charlie Bass. Let’s hear it for Charlie.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

As unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, it is a pleasure to be here. Welcome, Andy Peterson, former state senator. Peterborough is a great place to live. Candidates for president have come here year after year, decade after decade, and it is real honor today to have the next president of the United States, the only candidate who can beat Bill Clinton and beat Donald Trump. She served with distinction in South Carolina’s governor as UN ambassador. She is bringing this campaign to New Hampshire, the New Hampshire way. She’s out here meeting people, talking to people, and she will earn all of our vote. It is with great pleasure that I bring you Governor Nikki Haley.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. We’ve got you guys squeezed in so you get to love each other today. I appreciate that. It’s so-

Happy birthday!

Oh, thank you.

Happy birthday.

Thank you very much.

(singing)

Oh, that’s so nice.

(singing)

Thank you. And you can all give me a birthday present on Tuesday. Just saying. Just saying. How many of you are hearing me for the first time? Raise your hand. All of you. Well, it’s great to see you. I’m glad you’re here. We just came from Keene. We had a great event there. I will tell you, we have had a whirlwind of so many days with your governor, Chris Sununu. Give it up for him. He is an incredible governor. And Congressman, thank you for hosting us in your sweet town of Peterborough. It’s great to be here.

(04:30)
It’s a tough time right now in the country. You don’t have to turn on the news to see it. We’re $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’m going to do that with you today. Our Republicans did that to us too. You go back and look at that $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill that they passed with no accountability that has now left us with over 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps. That’s a third of our country. And now they continue to waste money with no thought that it’s our money they’re spending.

(05:21)
Congress has one job. That’s to give us a budget on time. Do you know they’ve only given us a budget on time four times in 40 years? Four times in 40 years. Do you know when I get to the White House what we’re going to say about that? “No budget on time, no pay.” We have to put an end to that. And I think it’s finally time we put an accountant in the White House. We need someone that knows the value of a dollar. The way we’ll deal with our economy is we’ll claw back the $100 billion dollars of unspent COVID dollars that are still out there. Instead of 87,000 IRS agents going after Middle America, we’ll go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of COVID fraud. One out of every $7 was spent fraudulently.

(06:10)
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. So did Chris. Why is Congress the only group that refuses to balance a budget? We’ll cut the spending. We’ll cut the borrowing. We’ll eliminate their pet projects and earmarks, and I’ll veto any spending bill that doesn’t take us back to pre-COVID levels. That will save us trillions.

(06:38)
And government’s way too big and way too bloated. So we’re going to take as many federal programs as we can and send them down to the state level. That way we reduce the size of the federal government, but we empower people on the ground. Think education, think welfare, think healthcare, think mental health. If all of those resources were sent down to the states with no strings, how better we could go and use that for support services.

(07:07)
And then we want to go and make sure that we open up the middle class. We’re watching the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so we want to make sure that we eliminate the federal gas and diesel tax in this country. We want to cut taxes on the middle class and simplify the brackets. And we want to make small business tax cuts permanent. They made the corporate tax cuts permanent. They only made the small business tax cuts temporary. Small businesses are the heartbeat of our economy. We need to start acting like it.

(07:41)
And then you look at education. Did you know only 31% of eighth graders in our country are proficient in reading? Only 27% of eighth graders in our country are proficient in math. If we don’t do something and do something quick, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. That’s why in South Carolina, we knew if a child couldn’t read by third grade, they were four times less likely to graduate high school. So instead of pushing them forward, we started holding them back. We brought in their parents, we did reading remediation, and we set them up for success. We’ve got to do that all over our country. We have got to get our kids reading again.

(08:25)
And no parent should ever wonder what’s being said or taught to their child in the classroom. We need complete transparency in the classroom. We’ll put every curriculum online so that parents can see it. Parents have one job. They know what their child needs. That’s why every parent needs to be able to decide which school their child goes to or what mode of education they get. And then let’s start building things in America again. Let’s put vocational classes back into our high schools. In South Carolina, we had apprenticeships all over our state. We taught our kids how to build the things we were making. That way we get them invested in our economy even before they finish school.

(09:09)
And then when it comes to the border, I don’t even know what to say. It doesn’t even look like the United States of America. I can’t even believe we’re allowing this lawlessness to happen. Eight million illegal immigrants have come to that border. We had more fentanyl cross the border last year that would kill every single American. Number one cause of death for adults 18 to 45? Fentanyl. And don’t think for a second China doesn’t know what they’re doing when they send it over.

(09:40)
When I was governor of South Carolina, regardless of what Donald Trump says, I passed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country. We’ll do what I did in South Carolina and we’ll go national with it. We’ll do a national E-Verify program and require every business show that the people they hire are in this country legally. We will defund sanctuary cities once and for all. No more safe havens for illegal immigrants. We’ll put 25,000 border patrol and ICE agents on the ground and let them do their job. We’ll go back to the Remain in Mexico policy so that no one even steps foot on US soil. And instead of catch and release, we’ll go to catch and deport. That’s how we’ll stop everything that’s happening on the border.

(10:27)
And then my parents always taught me, you take care of those who take care of you. But 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 it 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.

(11:14)
I’m the wife of a combat veteran. My husband deployed to Afghanistan. When he came home, that was a lot of prayers answered. But when we got home, that’s when 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. Let’s do more than just that two-week transition. Let’s take care of them for the long haul. Let’s put telehealth in so they get the mental healthcare they need, right when they need it. Let’s let them go to the doctor or hospital of their choice. They’ve earned that right. And I think the best way we take care of the VA healthcare system, 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.

(12:21)
And 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’ll get the EPA out of the way. Right now they care more about sagebrush lizards than they do about whether you can afford your utility bill. We’ll speed up our permitting. We’ll speed up the pipelines, including the Keystone Pipeline. We’ll make sure we export as much liquified natural gas as we can. We’ll do nuclear power. Instead of it just being our energy policy, we’ll turn it into an economic powerhouse. That will help us pay down our debt. That will help us reduce inflation and get us back on track. No more getting dirty oil from Iran and Venezuela or going hat in hand to Saudi Arabia.

(13:12)
And then when it comes to national security, the world is on fire. 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 have happened had we not had that debacle in Afghanistan. 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. And now our enemies smell blood in the water, and that’s why we’re seeing all these flareups all over the world.

(14:06)
But think about our number one national security threat, China. They’ve totally infiltrated our country. And that’s not me exaggerating. They’re already here. They bought 400,000 acres of US soil most recently near Grand Forks Air Force Base where our most sensitive drone technology is. They’ve put millions of dollars into our universities, spreading Chinese propaganda and stealing our research. Everybody got upset with the Chinese spy balloon, right? Rightfully so. What about the fact that it connected with a US internet company, picked up all that surveillance and took it to China?

(14:45)
90% of our law enforcement drones in America are Chinese. Think about the mini surveillance that’s happening. You’ve got Chinese police stations around our country. You’ve got a spy base going off our shores in Cuba. You’ve had more Americans die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam Wars combined. And China has built up their military at a scary pace. They now have 500 nuclear warheads. That’s 100 more than they had a year ago. They’ve built the largest naval fleet in the world. 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 cyber, they’re doing artificial intelligence, they’re doing space. They’ve developed hypersonic missiles. We’ve barely gotten started. And now they’re 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.

(15:51)
Don’t let Biden tell you China is 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 have to start looking at them the way they look at us. So how do we deal with China? We stop the sale of any US land and we take back the land they’ve already purchased. We go to our universities and we say, “You either take foreign money or you take American money, but the days of taking both are over,” and you get that infiltration out of our schools.

(16:28)
We blacklist the technology that builds up China and threatens America. The Biden administration approved 70% of it. The Trump administration approved even more than that. We go to them and we say, “We’re going to end all normal trade relations with you until you stop murdering Americans.” You watch how fast they move because they need our economy. And then we build up our military so that we’re strong. Strong militaries don’t start wars. Strong militaries prevent wars. And you don’t do that by throwing a bunch of money in the Department of Defense. You actually clean it up. You take out the bureaucracy, take out the red tape, make sure that we get it moving. Tell them to stop playing favorites with defense contractors. And we have to get rid of all these programs that don’t do anything for our military. For goodness’ sake, they have got to stop these gender pronoun classes. It’s demoralizing to our military.

(17:21)
We can take this on, but you can’t do it by putting your head in the sand. You got to be strong and tell them what we expect of them. So we know what to do domestically. We know what to do with national security. Now we just have to decide what to do. So now it’s time for more hard truths. 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. And we can’t be a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos and survive it, because we won’t. More than that. We cannot ever have a President Kamala Harris. That should send a chill up your spine. But right now, if you look at any of these head-to-head polls, Biden and Trump are even. On a good day, Trump might be up by two points. We will see what happened in 2018, in 2020 and 2022.

(18:39)
I’m in every one of those same general election polls. I beat Biden by 17 points. Do you know what that means? That’s bigger than the presidency. That’s governorships, that’s House, that’s Senate, that’s all the way down to the school board. You win with a double-digit mandate like that, that’s a mandate to stop the wasteful spending and get our economy back on track. That’s a mandate to get our kids reading again and go back to the basics in education. That’s a mandate to secure our borders with no more excuses. That’s a mandate to bring law and order back to our country. And that’s a mandate for a strong America that we can all be proud of. Don’t you want that? Because we could have that.

(19:38)
Trump keeps bashing that poll that has me 17 points up. He said it was a dirty poll. His own pollster did the poll so I don’t know how he could say that. He says that I’m losing to Biden in the polls. Look at any of them. You had one that came out yesterday. This should show you too. It’s for New Hampshire. It’s what would happen in a general election in New Hampshire. Trump loses to Biden by seven points in New Hampshire. I defeat Biden. It is what it is.

(20:17)
You have the opportunity right now to decide, do we want more of the same or do we want to go forward? More of the same is not just Joe Biden, it’s also Donald Trump. More of the same is acknowledging the fact that 70% of Americans say they don’t want Trump or Biden. The majority of Americans disprove of both of them. Look at the numbers. Both of these men put us trillions of dollars in debt, and our children will never forgive them for it. Everybody talks about what a good economy that Trump had. And it was good, right? But at what cost? He put us $8 trillion in debt over four years. How is that any different than Biden depleting our oil reserves just to make sure we had good gas prices? He put us at risk. Trump put us at risk by running up our credit card, knowing we couldn’t pay it back. And China, Russia and Iran see that.

(21:30)
And then you look at the fact that both Biden and Trump are so focused on their investigations and their grievances in the past that they haven’t given us a vision for the future. Our kids want a vision for the future. Now, Trump has been out there, and I’ve seen the ads you’ve seen, and everything he has said has been false. And I wish we could take every ad that was lying down because he’d have no ads on the air. He says I’m not for the border. That’s a lie. I passed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country. President Obama sued me and we won. I have always said we have to secure the border. He said that I want to cut social security. That’s a lie. I never said that. He actually said he wants to raise the retirement age to 70. He said I raised taxes. I never once raised a single tax. Although, he proposed raising our gas taxes by 25 cents in 2018 when he was president.

(22:42)
And then you go and look at what’s happening with our national security. When you have a world on fire, it’s no game. Because our job is to prevent war. Our job is to protect Americans. And look at the situation that we have. I don’t know if you remember when North Korea tortured Otto Warmbier, that college student that went there. I dealt with Otto’s parents on multiple occasions. I told them not to be quiet but to be loud. I told them to fight back, and they did. They’re the strongest people I know. When Cindy Warmbier, Otto’s mom, who watched him come back in a state none of us should ever see our children come back in, and she fought anyway, do you know how hard it was for her to hear her president say that he was writing love letters to the man that tortured her son?

(23:50)
What about the fact that Trump praised President Xi of China a dozen times after China gave us COVID? He said he stood with China when they took Hong Kong’s democracy. He congratulated the Chinese Communist Party on their 70th anniversary. Who does that? Not an American president. Do you know I had to sit down with him when we were in the administration and tell him to stop this bromance he had with Putin? It’s dangerous. You don’t do that. We’ve got a world on fire right now and it’s concerning.

(24:30)
And it’s personal for me. Six months ago I dropped my husband, Michael, off at 4:00 AM for another yearlong deployment, and I watched him and 230 soldiers pick up their two duffel bags of belongings to go to a country they’d 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 America here? Because we have a country to save.

(25:18)
And are we really going to go to our kids and tell them that their options are two 80-year-olds for president? Now, think about this. That’s not being disrespectful. Look at the difference between Joe Biden now and two years ago. What keeps me up at night is what happens between now and election day, because I know that Russia, China, and Iran see the state that he’s in. And then you have Trump. And last night something happened that has happened multiple times. He was on a temper tantrum about me, which is fine. He does that often. But he went on and talked about how I kept the police from going into the Capitol on January 6th, went on and repeated that I didn’t do anything to secure the Capitol.

(26:17)
Let’s be clear, I wasn’t in the Capitol on January 6th. I wasn’t in office on January 6th. He mentioned it three times. He got confused. He got confused and said he was running against Obama. He never ran against Obama. Don’t put our country at risk like this. This is not personal. I have no personal grievances with Donald Trump. It is personal when it comes to my kids. I don’t want them living like this. So when you go on Tuesday, that’s the choice you get to make is do we hold back or do we go forward?

(26:59)
Someone asked me why I was running and I said, “My parents came to this country 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. They need to know their sacrifice matters. They need to know that we love our country. I’m doing this for my daughter, who just got married, and I saw how hard it was for her and her husband to buy a home. The average home buyer in America now is 49 years old. The American dream is leaving them. And I’m doing this for my son, who’s a senior in college. I’m tired of watching him write papers of things he doesn’t believe in just to get an A. That’s not us. That’s not America.

(27:46)
And for the first time, 81% of Americans don’t think their kids are going to live 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 us on Tuesday, if you bring 10 friends with you and you join this movement, I promise you our best days are yet to come. Thank you very much. God bless you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That’s very nice. Thank you. Thank you.