Donald Trump says a gaffe in which he appeared to confuse former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his presidential election rival Nikki Haley wasn’t actually a gaffe at all, but rather a deliberate rhetorical ploy to articulate the point that, in his view, “they both stink.”
Speaking at a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday, the former president also dismissed concerns about multiple instances in which he seemingly confused President Joe Biden with former president Barack Obama. Trump has previously said this is also intended “sarcastically” and is not a sign of his cognitive decline, but rather a purposeful insinuation that Biden isn’t really in control of the country.
“When I say that Obama is the president of our country they go: ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden! He doesn’t know,’” Trump said Wednesday. “So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.” He went on to say: “I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and I when I purposely interpose names, they said: ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki.’”
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While discussing the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol last month, Trump pushed an inexplicable variant of his repeatedly debunked claim that Pelosi was responsible for the riot by declining his request for 10,000 National Guards troops to be deployed. On this occasion, he said it was the former South Carolina governor who had failed to heed his warnings—apparently confusing her for Pelosi.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it,” Trump said at the time. “All of it because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down.”
On Wednesday, the 2024 GOP frontrunner denounced his critics for reading too much into the apparent screw-up. “I interpose [the names], and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump said. “I said: ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common—they both stink,’” he added. “And remember this: when I make a statement like that about Nikki that means she will never be running for vice president.”
The day after Trump had publicly blamed Haley for Jan. 6, she addressed the incident by raising questions about his mental competence. “The concern I have is—I’m not saying anything derogatory—but when you’re dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this,” Haley said. “We can’t.”
Haley has recently campaigned on the claim that both Trump and Biden are now too old to run the country and has called for cognitive tests. Her Republican nomination rival said last month that he’d “aced” such a test and said he felt cognitively “better than I was 20 years ago.”
Biden has also been on the defensive about his mental sharpness after misidentifying three different world leaders in the space of a week. One of the instances—in which he mixed up the leaders of Mexico and Egypt—came during a fiery press conference in which he was trying to reassure the public about his mental faculties. The president was pushing back against an alarming report from Special Counsel Robert Hur describing Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t recall when his son had died “even within several years.”
