Donors abandon Haley as Trump warns of blacklist

Challenger plans to fight on for Republicans’ presidential nomination despite losing in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Nikki Haley has lost a number of key donors after losing to Donald Trump in the early battle for the Republican nomination. Picture: AFP

Several top donors have stopped funding Nikki Haley after her loss in New Hampshire as Donald Trump piles on the pressure with threats to ostracise anyone giving money to her long-shot presidential campaign.

He issued an angry warning on his Truth Social site that Haley donors “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp”, referring to his “Make America Great Again” slogan that has become his own political movement.

Haley has remained defiant, inviting donors to more than a dozen fundraising events. The main committee raising cash to support her announced that it brought in $US50.1m in the second half of last year - compared with $US46m raised by Trump’s main political action committee - suggesting that she has the resources to continue for a while.

Trump, 77, is furious that the woman he has nicknamed “Birdbrain” is fighting on for the nomination despite having lost in Iowa and New Hampshire. He is now seeking to starve her of funds to prevent her competing in the next early states and on Super Tuesday, March 5, when there are 16 contests.

Haley, 52, is also facing extreme pressure from senior Republicans, including an unprecedented intervention from Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the central party committee, who told Fox News: “I don’t see it for Nikki Haley.”

Many of the donors to the former South Carolina governor’s campaign back her precisely because they reject Trump and the MAGA takeover of the party. She lost in New Hampshire by 54.3 per cent to 43.2 per cent, but the CBS News exit poll showed that Trump won registered Republicans by 74 to 25 per cent, with Haley boosted by unaligned voters.

Andy Sabin, a metals magnate and prominent donor, said he would no longer fund Haley’s campaign and declared that the Republican race was essentially over. “Haley needs to drop out,” he said. “Her money is going to dry up. Why would you fund someone who you know has no chance?”

Another donor, Reid Hoffman, the anti-Trump billionaire co-founder of the online platform LinkedIn, has also pulled back. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Hoffman adviser, told The Wall Street Journal: “We invested in Governor Haley when we thought she had a shot of winning. I’d need to see a new case, with new evidence, to persuade me that more money could help her win now.”

Haley responded to Trump’s threats by posting a link on Twitter/X for anyone willing to donate. “Well in that case ... donate here. Let’s Go,” she wrote.

Haley’s campaign scored a coup in November when it won backing from the Americans for Prosperity Action group, founded by the billionaire Charles Koch. It has yet to indicate publicly whether it remains on board, issuing a statement after the New Hampshire primary noting that Haley was “closing the gap” on Trump but conceding there was a “steeper road ahead”.

Four Wall Street billionaires - Stanley Druckenmiller, Henry Kravis, Ken Langone and Cliff Asness - are scheduled to co-host a fundraising event for her on Tuesday in New York, one of three in the city next week.

Haley’s team did not respond to questions about whether that and other events would go ahead. Invitations have also gone out for three fundraisers in Florida - one of them in Trump’s backyard of Palm Beach - four in California, three in Texas and one in South Carolina four days before the make-or-break primary there on February 24. Prices for tickets start at dollars 3,300 and go as high as dollars 33,000.

The North Carolina businessman Art Pope told Reuters he was still in, but another Haley donor, Doug Deason, warned that her long-term career could be damaged if she failed to overhaul Trump’s huge lead in South Carolina. The 538 aggregate of polls puts the former president on 63.3 per cent and Haley on 24.9 per cent.

“She does not want to lose her home state,” Deason told The Washington Post. “Imagine she runs in 2028, that would be the things that other candidates use against her, that you can’t even win your own state.”

Trump pressured Republicans in Congress this week with November’s election in mind, demanding that they “kill” a bipartisan deal to tackle the migrant crisis on the southern border.

Negotiations to secure billions of dollars in funding to stem the record surge of undocumented migrants crossing into the US from Mexico have been under way for weeks, with a compromise deal taking shape in recent days. Republicans are blocking emergency military support for Ukraine and Israel, demanding agreement on border security as part of the deal.

Determined to deny President Joe Biden a victory on a hot-button issue heading into the general election, however, Trump contacted several Republican senators directly this week, urging them to reject the deal.

“Trump doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” one source told the HuffPost website. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president. He said he only wants the perfect deal.”

Biden’s failure to curb the flow of migrants is seen as one of his greatest weaknesses as he seeks re-election. Trump has already made the issue central to his 2024 campaign.

The pressure from Trump has divided Republican senators: Ted Cruz, in Texas, said on Wednesday that the agreement was a “stinking pile of crap”.

The HuffPost source added: “The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel [aid] and an actual border solution. But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”

The Times