Trump's GOP rival says ex-president's 'fingerprints' are 'all over' party's failure

Former President Donald Trump is responsible for the Republican Party's long string of failures, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday.

Haley, who is the final remaining Republican candidate opposing Trump for the nomination, warned that the GOP needs a new direction to avoid sliding further into disaster — and this is reflected throughout the party leadership.

"So how do you feel about the job Speaker Johnson's doing?" asked Tapper. "He seems unable to do basic stuff without his speakership being threatened. Members of the House Freedom Caucus threatened to oust him if even if they even brought to the floor for a vote on that bipartisan Senate foreign aid bill passed on a bipartisan measure in the Senate, aid for Ukraine, aid for Israel, if he even just brings it to a vote, not even supported, but just brings it to a vote, he could lose his speakership. What do you make of this dynamic?"

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"Well, the dynamic is the fact that with Donald Trump at the top of the Republican Party, we lost elections in 2018, we lost them in 2020, we lost them in 2022. You look, last week we lost a [vote to impeach Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas. We lost a vote on Israel, the RNC chair lost her job, and Donald Trump had his fingerprints all over it."

What all this means, she continued, is that "we need to start saying, what do we need to do to get bigger margins. So it's not about whether a speaker is going to lose his race. And a Marquette poll came out today, and again, Trump and Biden are margin of error. I defeat Joe Biden by 18 points in that Marquette poll. That's bigger than the presidency. That's House, that's Senate, that's governorships, that's everything. And when you go in with a mandate of double-digits, that's when work gets done. That's what we need to do."

"I tell everybody in a general election, you're given a choice in a primary, you make your choice," said Haley. "This is the time for everyone to vote in the primary and understand we can't right the ship in our country if we can't win an election, and we have to win that general election if we're going to right the ship."

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