‘Trump’s not going to be stopped’

From the outset of their campaign, the Republican presidential contender meticulously picked their battles against Donald Trump, waiting until the field winnowed to ratchet up their attacks.

If the strategy employed by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley sounds similar to the one used by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) eight years ago, that’s because it is.

“That was a strategy by design. We noticed that every other candidate who took on Trump got their head handed to them,” former Cruz campaign communications director Rick Tyler told The Post.

“We weren’t going to win by challenging Trump at every turn,” added Tyler, who has since co-founded consulting firm Foundry Strategies.

“We were gonna let the other candidates do that and let them get dispatched one by one. And that worked until we really were the last man standing.”

Unlike Haley, the Cruz campaign had to contend with the presence of then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose campaign Tyler described as “irrelevant” and a “nuisance.”

In the end, Cruz and Kasich both dropped out of the 2016 race in early May, after Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary practically clinched the nomination.

While both Cruz and Haley appeal to disparate wings of the Republican base and competed in radically different political landscapes, keeping their powder dry helped cement them as the leading Trump alternative.

‘Waited way too long’

With the benefit of hindsight, nearly half a dozen former insiders on the 2016 Cruz campaign are bearish about how the strategy was deployed — and are skeptical about whether it is even possible to beat Trump in a Republican presidential race.

“Cruz’s campaign definitely waited way too long to attack Trump,” said Josh Perry, new media director on the Texas senator’s presidential run.

“I think that in 2016, there was the idea that Trump wasn’t a serious candidate, and at some point, he would drop out of the race, and by not attacking him, you’d be able to absorb his supporters,” he added, noting that logic wouldn’t hold up in 2024 — when Trump is, in the words of one former high-level Cruz official who backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this cycle, “functionally an incumbent president.”

The onetime Cruz campaign honcho posited that pivoting to drawn-out Trump-bashing was futile, but added that he believes Haley was forced to do so in order to draw more attention to herself.

“Republicans don’t have the stomach for a long negative [primary] campaign,” he said. “This one is so out of reach for Haley, she has to do negative because she has to change the paradigm.”

The ex-official conditioned that Trump, a famous brass-knuckled rhetorical brawler, “kind of breaks the rules on some of these things.”

“The more aggressive and the nastier she gets in attacking Donald Trump, the more she’s gonna lose by,” another former senior Cruz adviser said of Haley.

The most prominent contender to test out an “attack Trump” strategy in 2024 was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who generally scored some of the highest negatives among GOP voters.

Christie ultimately dropped out in January, days before the Iowa caucus, with some parting shots at Haley in a stunning hot mic episode.

“When you make your whole campaign about [Trump], you don’t have anything to say about yourself,” the former top Cruz official cautioned.

Despite misgivings about Cruz’s strategy, alumni of his campaign aren’t entirely sure that he would have fared any better if he followed the more aggressive tactics of other 2016 GOP contenders, such as Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

“I think that if we had pursued the strategy that most people were following, which was the conventional political strategy of just attack back and maybe we’ll win — I think we would have not won,” Tyler said.

“I don’t think we would’ve been the last person standing.”

‘Tie Trump and Biden together’

Haley’s campaign manager Betsy Ankney told The Post earlier this month during a press call that the former South Carolina governor is keen on pointing out contrasts between herself and Trump.

“She is going to call him out on policies that she disagrees with at every chance she gets,” Ankney said. “We are continuing to tie Trump and Biden together to folks who are of a different generation who are past their prime and who are too afraid to stand up and debate.”

Ankney downplayed the potential risks of alienating swaths of the GOP base that deeply admire Trump. Haley herself has blended attacks against the former president with a defense of some of his policies as well as some overtures to his supporters.

For example, she has committed to pardoning Trump if he is convicted in one of the two federal criminal cases pending against him.

Unstoppable force

Unlike Haley, Cruz managed to draw political blood from Trump, winning the leadoff 2016 Iowa caucus as well as contests in Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Maine.

“We recognized … if you give Donald Trump a win in the first state, in Iowa, and a healthy and substantial one, he’s not going to be stopped,” the former senior adviser said.

“That’s why Cruz winning it in ’16 was so consequential not just for his own candidacy, but for the entire field to keep the race going.”

This time around, after Trump has romped to double-digit wins in every contest so far, the Cruz alumni think the race is already over.

“I don’t think Haley has a prayer of beating him at this point,” Tyler said.

“It was still very much an open question as to who the nominee might have been in 2016,” Perry said. “I don’t think I could pick a single primary or caucus that Nikki Haley’s likely to win.”

Another difference between 2016 and 2024 is that the field was whittled down much faster this time around — though unlike eight years ago, most of the also-rans have supported Trump.

And then there is the question of ideology. The Cruz alumni split over how to characterize Haley’s worldview.

“I think she’s clearly to the right of Trump, by any standard — by any measure,” Tyler said. “It pains me to hear people describe themselves as conservative and support Trump. It’s like watching someone who claims to be a vegan chewing on raw meat.”

“She’s coming at Trump on the left. We were coming from the right,” the former top Cruz official countered. “Her base has Never Trumpers — that was essentially Kasich’s base.”

Also complicating matters for Haley, this person added, is that “nobody believes Biden is unbeatable,” which undercuts her electability pitch.

Campaign regrets

The former senior Cruz adviser muses that Haley’s fatal error was beating down DeSantis in Iowa, depriving him of a shot at making the race seem close. But even then, he believes this “thing was probably settled in the summer” of 2023 with Trump’s cascading legal difficulties that rallied the GOP base around him.

The relative lack of suspense in this cycle provides ample opportunity to reflect on missed opportunities from 2016.

“If Cruz was able to get [Trump] in a one-on-one debate, I think that would have been significant. Number two … there was talk about a joint Rubio-Cruz ticket and by the way, if that had happened, I do think history might have changed,” the adviser said.

Tyler recounted an “after-action meeting” with the senator and his team in which “No one had the answer to the riddle of Trump.”

“I think that the best thing we probably could have done in 2016 differently is, probably all of the candidates should have ganged up against Trump and just mocked and ridiculed him from the beginning as a joke,” said Perry.

“When Trump came into the 2016 campaign, he was viewed as a joke. Everybody viewed him as a joke,” Tyler further recalled. “We all doubled over laughing at his antics until he started to win. And then it was like, ‘Wait, there’s something different going on here.’”