Scaramucci on Trump threat to Haley donors: ‘She’s hurting him’

Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director under former President Trump, on Thursday said Trump is levying threats against potential donors to his GOP primary opponent, Nikki Haley, because he knows she’s hurting his campaign efforts.

In an interview on “CNN This Morning,” Scaramucci said Trump’s threats make clear Haley is effectively taunting the former president and hurting him in the long run.

“Oh, she’s hurting him. I mean, you have to look at the case that she’s making against him, and then you have to look at the exit polling on the voters that are saying they’re not going to cross over to Donald Trump,” Scaramucci said. “And so she is hurting him. He knows she’s hurting him.”

Scaramucci, who served just 10 days in Trump’s Cabinet in 2017, also noted that while Trump won the first two 2024 nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the significant share of voters who say they won’t vote for the former president in a general election is bad news for him.

“If you look at the results in New Hampshire, if you’re on his campaign, you can pretend that they were great, but they’re really not that great. He got 50ish percent of the vote, which means that 50 percent of the Republicans really don’t want him, and then when you do the exit polling,” he said, in both Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s clear many Haley voters would not cross over.

Scaramucci said that even though those margins might be slim, historically, party-aligned voters who refuse to vote for the ultimate nominee can mean trouble for the candidate’s long-term prospects.

“Now, you know, that killed Hillary Clinton with the Bernie Sanders voters in ’16, and of course, Barack Obama got 75 percent of the Hillary Clinton voters in ’08, so this is, this is really hurting Donald Trump. He knows that, which is why he’s so frustrated and why he’s launching all these threats and the invective,” Scaramucci added.

Trump on Wednesday sharpened his attack on Haley, warning that anyone who donates to her campaign will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.”

In recent weeks, establishment GOP lawmakers have lined up behind Trump — even those who had previously been critical of the former president.

Haley is the last remaining major GOP primary candidate challenging Trump. According to The Hill and Decision Desk HQ’s national GOP primary polling average, Trump has a 55.9 percentage point lead over Haley, with 68.2 percent support compared with Haley’s 12.3 percent.