Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Donald Trump has a woman problem.
That sounds like an obvious statement about the thrice married former president who is currently defending himself against charges he paid off a porn star he slept with just months after his wife gave birth to their son.
But Stormy Daniels — said porn star — isn’t the only woman stalking the embattled mogul, tying up his time and money, and threatening to upend his chance at a second term.
There’s E. Jean Carroll. A jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s, and then awarded her $83.3 million in punitive and compensatory damages after Trump defamed her in denying those claims.
There’s also New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, two women who are pursuing additional charges against Trump in separate cases.
But it might not be a woman named Stormy, E. Jean, Tish or Fani who end Trump’s political aspirations. It might be a woman named Nikki.
You remember Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who took on Trump in the Republican primary a million years ago — or earlier this year?
Well, despite dropping out of the race after Super Tuesday, her ghost continues to haunt Trump in some very significant and, for him, ominous ways.
On Tuesday night, Indiana Republican primary voters unsurprisingly awarded Trump all 58 of their delegates. But somewhat surprisingly, more than 20% of them voted against him. While he handily won 78.3% of the vote, the 128,000 Republican voters who instead pulled the lever for Nikki Haley sent the presumptive nominee a serious message: “We are not with you.”
Lest you think that an anomaly, late last month 83.4% of Republicans in Pennsylvania voted for Trump. But significantly, 16.6% — or roughly 158,000 — voted for Haley.
There’s more.
In Washington state, Haley won 19.3% — 150,832 votes — of the Republican primary vote. In Arizona, she won 17.8%. In Illinois, she won 14.5%. In Ohio, she won 14.4%.
This was all after Haley had officially dropped out of the race.
Needless to say, Trump should be very concerned.
For one, there’s the bad optics of a former president losing as much as 20% of his base to someone who is no longer running.
But, obviously, there’s also the math. In as tight a general election as this is turning out to be, Trump simply can’t afford to lose that much of his base.
In 2020, the battleground states that determined the fate of the election were decided by even fewer voters than the groups currently going for Haley.
In Michigan, Joe Biden beat Trump by just 154,188 votes. In Arizona, Biden won by only 10,457 votes. In Georgia, you remember, Trump asked the secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” in order to overturn the election.
For Trump those are some tight — and terrifying — margins.
There are likely myriad reasons why a not insignificant number of Republicans are still refusing to back him. Some are sick of the chaos, the trials, the constant drama, distractions, and unseriousness. Others are turned off by Trump’s MAGA acolytes in Congress, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert, who consistently embarrass the party.
But there’s evidence a single issue is helping to drive those numbers: abortion.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll of seven battleground states, 39% of suburban women “cite abortion as a make-or-break issue for their vote — making it by far the most motivating issue for the group.”
And, “nearly three-quarters of them say the procedure should be legal all or most of the time, and a majority thinks Trump’s policies are too restrictive.”
Considering Trump keeps bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s not likely he can win those voters back.
It’s a question as to whether he’s even trying, in fact.
While he’s attempted to mitigate the blowback from a number of unpopular legislative wins against abortion rights by punting the issue rhetorically to the states, he’s explicitly told Haley voters he doesn’t want them.
After she won 43% of the vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary, Trump warned, “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain [Nikki Haley], from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them…!”
So the big question looms: Where do these voters go if Trump isn’t trying to win them back? Will they stay home? Vote for Biden? RFK Jr.?
They have a plethora of options other than holding their nose and voting for him. Believe it or not, despite dropping out, Nikki Haley might just be the woman standing between Trump and the White House.
©2024 S.E. Cupp. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.