Donald Trump has often accused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of failing to provide adequate security for the Capitol. On Friday, he inexplicably substituted Nikki Haley’s name for Ms. Pelosi’s.
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Nikki Haley at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H., on Friday.
Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday appeared to confuse Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Ms. Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and connecting her to the House committee that investigated it.
Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot.
On Friday night, Mr. Trump was in the middle of mocking Ms. Haley for the size of the crowds at her events, and criticizing the news media, when he pivoted to how he gave a speech in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol attack.
“You know, when she comes here she gets like nine people, and the press never reports the crowds,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Haley, whose crowds have lately been, at the very least, in double digits.
Then, he changed subjects. “You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6,” he said. “You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley.”
Mr. Trump then repeated his frequent claim that the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — including Mr. Trump’s actions that day — “destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence.”
Then, he claimed that Ms. Haley was in charge of security that day, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.
“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” he said. (She was not.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”
Mr. Trump, 77, often attacks President Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Mr. Biden is mentally unfit for office. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.”
A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has frequently tried to lay blame for the Jan. 6 riot with Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats. There is no evidence, however, that Mr. Trump ever offered to have troops deployed to the Capitol, or that Ms. Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, rejected him.
At 3:52 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Haley reposted photos of besieged officials inside the Capitol, writing on Twitter, “An embarrassment in the eyes of the world and total sadness for our country. Wake up America.”
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold
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Source: nytimes.com
