On Saturday, Nikki Haley tore into former president and GOP front-runner Donald Trump after he confused her with Nancy Pelosi, claiming she had to scold him while serving as his ambassador to the United Nations.
“Guess what, when you’re 80 you’re just not as sharp as you used to be,” Haley said while speaking to a crowd of about 200 voters at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture, a museum in Peterborough, N.H.
The comment came following a gaffe from Trump on Friday evening in Concord, New Hampshire, in which he referred to Haley instead of Pelosi while discussing the Jan. 6 Capitol incident.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security,” he said in the speech. “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”
“The man was going on a rant about how I was keeping Capitol police from going in on January 6. He went on and on,” Haley said. “I wasn’t in DC on January 6. I had nothing to do with the Capitol.”
She also slammed Trump’s relationship with foreign dictators, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, claiming that she had to sit him down at one point during her tenure as U.N. Ambassador.
“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?” she asked the crowd.
“It’s dangerous, you don’t do that,” she said. “We’ve got a world on fire right now.”
Trump has repeatedly defended his relationships with Putin and other authoritarian leaders, such as China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, claiming his approach with the various dictators was “a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Haley, meanwhile, brought out several grievances on Saturday, just days ahead of New Hampshire’s primary.
“What about the fact that Trump praised President Xi of China a dozen times after China gave us COVID?” she asked.
“He said he stood with China when they took Hong Kong’s democracy. He congratulated the Chinese Communist Party on their 70th anniversary,” Haley continued. “Who does that? Not an American president!”
