Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign promoted “Love Letters from Trump” on Wednesday, with a series of Valentines’ cards addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin and others.
The Valentine’s Day gimmick included a love letter from former President Donald Trump to himself that stated: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. I love dictators & they love me too.”
Aside from that first message, the letters included positive statements Trump had previously expressed transposed onto pink and red hearts.
One to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un reads: “Kim wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
Trump made that remark during a rally in West Virginia in 2018.
The message to China’s Xi Jinping commended him for being “strong like granite” and running “1.4 billion people with an iron hand”—real praise Trump offered in November.
The “love letter” from Putin highlighted Trump saying he’d congratulated Putin on his victory and claiming “The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him.”
“They are wrong! Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” it added, invoking Trump’s comments from 2018.
The final letter put out by Haley’s campaign, addressed to the Taliban, calls them “good fighters.”
“The Taliban, good fighters, I will tell you, good fighters. You have to give them credit for that,” Trump told Fox News in 2021. “They’ve been fighting for a thousand years.” (The group was founded in 1994).
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, told the New York Post in response to the release that “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley has a minor league brain in a major league world.”
“She is simply too stupid to comprehend that President Trump brought peace and prosperity to the country,” he said. “Meanwhile, Haley wants to bow down to China and throw America into forever wars.”
Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 until 2018 under the Trump administration, has made Trump’s foreign policy a frequent target in her presidential campaign against him.
But Trump trounced her in every Republican primary contest held thus far—except Nevada, where he did not appear on the ballot and Haley lost to the “none of these candidates” option. Recent national polling puts Trump up more than 56 points on average over Haley for the Republican nomination, and 33 points up in her home state of South Carolina, where the next primary contest will be held in late February.
