PETERBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE – Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley raised questions Saturday about Donald Trump’s fitness for America’s top office after he confused her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a tirade the previous night.
“There is a decline. That’s a fact. Ask any doctor,” said Haley, referencing her elderly parents when asked by The Messenger about Trump’s blunder.
“We’ve got to have eight years of someone who is on it all the time,” she said. “I’m worried that we’re not going to have someone who is on it two years from now. It is a concern. And it is what Americans should be thinking about.”
Trump at a Friday campaign appearance in Concord, New Hampshire, railed at “Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley” for rejecting his purported offer of 10,000 National Guard troops to quell the violence on Jan. 6. Haley wasn’t even in his administration at the time and was working in the private sector.
He has leveled the same complaints in the past against Pelosi.
At her first campaign stop in Keene, New Hampshire on Saturday, an astonished Haley said Trump at the rally was “going on and on mentioning me multiple times as to why I didn’t [manage] security during the Capitol riots. Why didn’t I handle Jan. 6 better.”
She added to laughter: “I wasn’t even in D.C. on Jan. 6. I wasn’t in office then.”
They’re “saying he got confused, that he was talking …. about Nancy Pelosi,” said Haley.
“The concern I have is … when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this,” she said, apparently referring to President Joe Biden as the other candidate raising concerns.
The number of Trump blunders at campaign events has soared, even as he repeatedly challenges Biden’s mental acuity in the very same speeches.
In recent gaffes, Trump has mistakenly praised Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban as the “great leader” of Turkey, and boasted that he’s leading Barack Obama in the polls in the presidential race, when he meant Biden.
He has also claimed to have beaten Obama in a presidential race (he never ran against Obama) and that he won the Iowa caucus three times (he won twice).
He has also warned that the “cognitively impaired” Biden is leading the country into “World War II,” which the nation entered 83 years ago.
Trump insisted early this month at a speech in Iowa that magnets don’t work under water. They do.
Trump, 77, has repeatedly targeted Biden’s advanced age. Biden, 81, is only four years older than Trump.