Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is up with its first TV ad in New Hampshire attacking GOP presidential rival Nikki Haley as the former South Carolina governor sees a rise in polling ahead of the key early voting state’s primary.
The 30-second spot focused on immigration attempts to tie Haley to President Joe Biden’s policies as the Trump campaign continues to hammer the Biden administration over security at the US-Mexico border and illegal immigration.
“Record numbers streaming across our border costing taxpayers billions and almost as many Americans killed from fentanyl as killed in World War II,” the narrator in the ad says.
The campaign homed in on Haley’s opposition to Trump’s travel bans he implemented toward several Muslim-majority countries and African nations when he was president.
Haley said at a recent GOP debate: “I don’t think that you have a straight-up Muslim ban as much as you look at the countries that have terrorist activity that want to hurt Americans. You can ban those people from those countries… It’s not about a religion, it’s about a fact that certain countries are dangerous and are threats to us.”
The narrator in the Trump ad says, “Haley’s weakness puts us in grave danger. Trump’s strength protects us.”
Haley’s campaign later responded to the Trump campaign ad attacking her.
“Donald Trump must be seeing the same polls we’re seeing and is running scared. This is a two-person race between Nikki and Trump,” Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement to CNN.
A super PAC supporting Trump’s candidacy, MAGA Inc., launched a new television ad campaign in New Hampshire in recent weeks targeting Haley.
Trump has been ratcheting up his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail and has made the border a focal point of his political message. The former president recently doubled down on his assertion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” —comments that earned him significant backlash and comparisons to Adolf Hitler.
