Nikki Haley to Trump: 'Quit whining' about Harris, talk about issues

Nikki Haley is warning former President Trump to “quit whining” about Kamala Harris and focus on the issues as Republican fear his once-potent campaign is flailing.

After weeks of Trump scattershot and ineffective attacks on Harris’s identity and intelligence, Haley chided her onetime bitter primary rival to get back on message before it’s too late.

“The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she is dumb,” Haley said in a Fox News interview. “You can’t win on those things.”

Haley urged Trump’s campaign to start doing a better job at tying Harris to her unpopular boss, President Biden.

“This administration is Kamala Harris’ administration. Everything that has happened is hers,” Haley said. “So define her in that way. Talk about those issues.”

“It’s time for Republicans to make a serious shift, stop whining, and start defining Kamala Harris as the liberal she is,” she added in a tweet on Wednesday.

The former U.N. ambassador’s advice to Trump is important because she commands significant sway with a portion of the Republican electorate as well as moderate independent voters who do not like Trump.

She ran an aggressive primary campaign against Trump, but eventually threw in the towel and endorsed his reelection. Haley braved boos from Trump fans to speak at the Republican National Convention where she argued that Trump’s policies make him a better choice than Harris.

Trump was riding high in the polls, especially after he survived an assassination attempt, and advisers believed he was cruising to reelection over Biden.

But his campaign was caught flat footed when Biden abruptly dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket.

Harris has quickly lit a fire under Democrats and erased Trump’s lead in the polls. She’s heading into the Democratic National Convention next week with political wind at her back.

Trump has responded by lashing out at Harris with a series of seemingly unplanned attacks, like mispronouncing her first name and falsely claiming that she only recently started identifying as a Black woman.

He summoned reporters last week to his Mar-a-Lago estate for a press conference, which he used to spew more lies including a fake story that he was in a near-helicopter crash with ex-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, whom Trump claimed derided Harris.

Then Trump went on Elon Musk’s social media site for a rambling and glitchy two-hour conversation in which he joked about mass firing of workers and awkwardly compared Harris’s physical appearance to that of his wife, Melania.

Republican analysts say Trump urgently needs to get his message together and start hitting Harris on issues like inflation and the border, where he enjoys an edge with voters.

“He needs to get back to predominantly focusing on the economy,” GOP strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson said on CNN. “That’s not what happens when he goes off on weird tangents.”

GOP consultant Frank Luntz warned the Trump campaign to wake up and put a stop to Harris’s surge before she pulls out of reach.

“She’s got an intensity advantage,” Luntz told CNBC. “I haven’t seen anything like this happen in 30 days in my lifetime.”