Leading Trump rivals in head-to-head showdown ahead of Iowa vote
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have savaged each other in the final Republican televised debate, seeking to be a clear No 2 before the Iowa caucuses next week, while Donald Trump again held his own event.
As the race for second in the Republican presidential primaries and polling becomes more urgent, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley went after each other bitterly in the final televised debate before the Iowa caucuses next Monday (Tuesday AEDT).
While Ms Haley and Mr DeSantis have started criticising Republican polling frontrunner Donald Trump more frequently, the debate today has been nasty as they are essentially competing for second place.
Within the first hour of the fifth debate both had accused one another of lying several times, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Ms Haley, a former South Carolina governor, even touted a new website called DeSantislies.com about the Florida governor’s purported missteps.
Ms Haley said Mr DeSantis has “spent more time trying to lie about me than he is about telling the truth about himself”.
Here are some of the topics on which the two exchanged nasty words.
Mr DeSantis on Ms Haley: She disrespects Iowa voters. She was inspired by Hillary Clinton to run for office. Haley runs from fights. She was friendly to China as governor. She tried to raise the gas tax and proposed raising the grocery tax. She is weak on illegal immigration. She brought Syrian refugees into South Carolina.
Ms Haley on Mr DeSantis: His state is a hot spot for inflation. He voted to raise the debt limit. He ran on banning on fracking and asked Trump to stop drilling. He authored and ran the charge on banning the renewable field standard. He has waffled on aid to Ukraine.
The rivalry between Ms Haley and Mr DeSantis continued to accelerate as the debate went on.
At one point, Mr DeSantis was running down a list of issues he believes Ms Haley has lied about. Ms Haley cut in: “You are so desperate. You are just so desperate.”
“He can call me whatever name he wants. It doesn’t change the fact that Ron’s lying because Ron’s losing,” she said later about the Florida governor. She has touted her desantislies.com website somewhere around a dozen times.
Ms Haley made clear she has no patience for Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The notion that Mr Trump won the race has gained broad acceptance among his supporters, and many Republican officials and candidates aren’t eager to take on the issue for fear of angering the party’s most popular figure.
Mr Trump “said that January 6th [2001] was a beautiful day. I think January 6th was a terrible day. And we should never want to see that happen again,” Ms Haley said.
“That election, Trump lost it. [Joe] Biden won that election. And the idea that he has gone and carried this out forever to the point he is going to continue to say these things to scare the American people are wrong.”
Ms Haley also said “that’s absolutely ridiculous” in response to an argument Mr Trump’s lawyer made in court that a president should have immunity for any conduct, including and ordering the assassination of a political rival. Mr DeSantis was less aggressive in his response, avoiding the question outright but said it wouldn’t be an issue for him as president because he would follow the constitution.
The candidates were responding to a Washington federal appeals court this week signalling it would reject the former president’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election. Mr DeSantis warned that if Mr Trump is the nominee he will be stuck in legal troubles this year which will be a distraction.
In closing statements. Ms Haley warned that if Mr Trump is president again it will be “four more years of chaos”. She noted a Wall Street Journal poll that had her beating President Biden by 17 points, compared with the former president’s more narrow lead of 4 points over Mr Biden and Mr Ron DeSantis’s tie.
Meanwhile, Mr DeSantis focused on his record as Florida governor. “Donald Trump is running to pursue his issues. Nikki Haley’s running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues, your family’s issues, and solely to turn this country around.”
Elsewhere, the former Republican president was holding a televised “town hall” where he sat down with Fox News anchors instead of standing on the debate stage.
Republican voters, some undecided, are sitting in the Fox audience and cheering often.
Mr Trump said that if he were re-elected, he would start paying down the country’s debt — a goal that eluded him by trillions of dollars in his first term.
He also said he knows who he would choose as his vice-presidential nominee but declined to name that person.
Mr Trump fired multiple salvos at Mr DeSantis’s record as Florida governor, including over the state’s Covid-19 shutdown, but fewer at Ms Haley. When asked if Mr Trump would divest from his businesses in his second term, which he declined to do in his first, he answered vaguely, saying, “I don’t get free money.”
AFP reports:
The ex-president will be encouraged by new Suffolk University/USA TODAY polling showing 51 per cent of Republicans did not plan to watch the debate, reflecting the low stakes that many voters see in the “undercard” contest.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mr Trump leads the field in Iowa at 52.3 per cent, with Ms Haley — his former envoy to the United Nations — and Mr DeSantis in a margin-of-error tussle at 16.3 and 16 per cent respectively.
The national picture is similar, although Mr Trump’s lead is even larger — a daunting 51.5 percentage points.
Much of the campaign activity in Iowa has been overshadowed in the final week by the legal woes facing Mr Trump, who has sought to use the precincts of courthouses across the country to dominate TV coverage and rally support.
He ducked out of campaigning Tuesday for a hearing in Washington, where he faces charges over an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Mr Trump is also due back in court Thursday local time for his civil fraud case in New York.
Mr DeSantis was praised for his strongest performance in the fourth debate in Alabama last month, but his campaign has never lived up to the initial hype.
The conservative hard-liner is seeking to regain ground lost to Ms Haley and his path to the nomination depends on a strong showing in Iowa.
Mr DeSantis has also criticised Mr Trump for refusing to participate in the debates, telling reporters the ex-president is dodging his duty to answer questions over his policies and record.
“He parachutes in for (a) 30, 45-minute, hour speech and then just leaves, rather than listening to Iowans, answering questions and doing, I think, what it takes to win,” he said at a recent event in Elkader, Iowa.
Ms Haley is looking to outperform expectations in the Midwestern state and ride into a one-on-one match-up with Mr Trump in her preferred battleground of New Hampshire, a northeastern state where independents are allowed to vote and could give her campaign a significant boost.
She has had a few recent missteps on the campaign trail, notably failing to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War and facing criticism for her suggestion that New Hampshire voters would “correct” whatever happens in Iowa.
But her campaign received a shot in the arm hours ahead of the debate when former New Jersey governor Chris Christie – by far Mr Trump’s most vocal critic who was running third in New Hampshire – dropped out of the race.
“I would rather lose by telling the truth, than lie in order to win,” Mr Christie, a former Trump aide, told supporters at an event in Windham, New Hampshire.
“And I feel no differently today because this is a fight for the soul of our party and the soul of our country.” He didn’t offer an endorsement, but vowed never to support the former president again, saying he got into the race to “tell the truth about his divisiveness, his stoking of anger for his own benefit, in putting himself before the people of this country.”
Mr Trump, who often arranges “counterprogramming” to draw attention away from the debates, was taking part in a Fox News town hall event elsewhere in Des Moines as Mr DeSantis and Ms Haley were onstage.
CNN is due to host another debate on January 21 in New Hampshire, two days ahead of the Granite State’s primary.
ADAM CREIGHTON comments:In the final debate before critical Iowa caucuses next week, the Florida governor appeared to prevail
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