Former President Donald Trump claims he was being sarcastic when he mixed up former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley last month.
The remarks from Trump came during a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, in which he pushed back on any claims that he has had public mental lapses in recent weeks.
“So it’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose. I’m not a Nicki fan, and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki,” Trump said.
The comment he’s referring to came last month when he was speaking in New Hampshire and was pushing the claim that Pelosi was to blame for security failures at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
However, he didn’t say Pelosi’s name. He said Haley’s, who was nowhere near the capitol during the riots or has ever had anything to do with security there.
“By the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6. You know Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, 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. All of it,” Trump said last month. “Because of lots of things…like Nikki Haley is in charge of security — we offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”
While the apparent mixup drew criticism, with Democrats attempting to play the same game Republicans do with President Joe Biden, claiming Trump, who is four years Biden’s younger, is also too old for another term.
Even Biden got in on the action.
“I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi,” Biden wrote in a post on X with a montage of more Trump gaffs.
Still, on Wednesday, Trump claimed that there was no mixup and that he meant to say what he said.
“I interpose, and they make a big deal out of it. I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common. They both stink.’ Remember this. When I make a statement like that about Nikki, that means she will never be running for vice president,” Trump said.