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Newberry, South Carolina: Nikki Haley has again suggested without evidence that the Democrats would not be renominating US President Joe Biden because of questions about his age and memory, while continuing her calls to Republicans that they not overlook former president Donald Trump’s own mental competency in the 2024 presidential contest.
“I said this before, and everybody in the media lost their mind, but Joe Biden is not going to be the nominee – he is not,” she said outside an opera house in Newberry, South Carolina, where she began what is expected to be a dayslong bus tour across the state. In a later news conference, Haley added that Republicans needed to “wake up” and choose someone else as their nominee as well.
Nikki Haley is trying to steer the conversation towards the ages of Trump, 77, and Biden, 81.Credit: AP
When asked what moves she believed Democrats were making to thwart Biden’s nomination, she did not offer any specifics, only saying, “I mean, there’s no way that they’re not in complete panic right now.”
The remarks from Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador under Trump, are part of a new argument – her sharpest against Trump yet – that she unveiled this week in light of the special counsel report questioning Biden’s mental acuity over his handling of classified documents. Haley has been taking a more combative posture toward Trump as the two head into an important primary showdown in her home state on February 24.
At the stop in Newberry, a crowd of about 100 people cheered as a sleek, navy blue Nikki Haley bus arrived outside an opera house to the tune of Van Halen’s Right Now. Some attendees wore “Trump is too Chicken to debate” stickers, and campaign staff members passed out worksheets that asked respondents to draw a clock, identify animals and explain pairs of words. “Can you pass a mental competency test?” they read. “Can Joe Biden? Can Donald Trump?”
‘Why do we have to have someone in their 80s running for office?’
Nikki Haley
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On the stump, Haley emphasised the state’s progress under her leadership before quickly pivoting to what has become her standard set of attacks on Trump, 77, and Biden, 81, casting both men as belonging to the same bygone era of politics, and more aggressively criticising Republicans for rallying behind the former president and his “chaos”.
“Why do we have to have someone in their 80s running for office? Why can’t they let go of the power and let a new generational leader come in there?” Haley asked, calling them “grumpy, old men”.