CNBC Transcript: 2024 Presidential Candidate (R) Nikki Haley Speaks with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Today

WHEN: Today, Monday, January 29, 2024

WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk Box"

Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with 2024 Presidential Candidate (R) Nikki Haley on CNBC's "Squawk Box" (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Monday, January 29. Following is a link to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/01/29/nikki-haley-on-2024-race-this-is-far-from-over.html.

All references must be sourced to CNBC.

BECKY QUICK: She has lost to former President Trump in both the Iowa and the New Hampshire primaries, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. But former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley vowing to keep going in the race to become the Republican presidential candidate. Joining us right now is Nikki Haley herself. Thank you for being here, Governor, Ambassador.

NIKKI HALEY: Of course.

QUICK: I guess the first question is, how do you do it, because the path to get there has become a lot more difficult.

HALEY: You know, it's interesting because you say that I lost in New Hampshire. It's not really good for an incumbent not to get 43 percent of the vote.

QUICK: Fair.

HALEY: You know, you look at the fact that the delegate count, he has 32, I have 17.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: It takes 1,215 to get it. And so, you know, a lot of the reason that I am for term limits is the same reason that I will say kind of to the media class and the political class is, they're so cynical. You know, they've forgotten what it's like to have good things happen and to be hopeful and to be optimistic. This is not over. It's far from over. And what I'll tell you is, look, he has been literally unhinged ever since I got 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. And so, I know what we're doing is working. But I also know that we had hundreds of people --

QUICK: Yes, but the attacks have gotten much – much more.

HALEY: I'm sorry?

QUICK: The attacks have gotten much more directed and much tougher coming at you.

HALEY: Yes, but that means I'm doing well. I mean, I don't --

SORKIN: Right.

QUICK: No, from him. From him, I mean.

HALEY: Yes. No, I mean, I know him well, and I know that when he feels vulnerable, when he feels threatened, he lashes out. And you saw the night of the New Hampshire election, he literally had a temper tantrum on stage. And it's because he knew that he had told everybody we were going to be 30 points down, and we weren't. And we came in and 43 percent, and he just lost his mind over it.

QUICK: But in order to win, you have to win some states. Right now the polls have you down sharply in your own home state. So, what states do you win and how do you kind of take back the narrative—

HALEY: Well, I think you look at -- we gained 25 points in the last three weeks of New Hampshire. So, we've got a month until South Carolina. So, we're going to keep building. There haven't been any current polls.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: But we're going to keep doing it. We had 1,500 people in the upstate of South Carolina. We had a thousand people in Charleston. Last night we had several hundred in the PD. People are out there excited.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: They know what my record is. But, more than that, they don't want the chaos anymore.

SORKIN: Can I –

HALEY: They see how President Trump acted, just think in the last 48 hours what he did. He has a temper tantrum and talks about revenge. Then, the next day, he goes and says, anybody that supports her is not going to be part of my MAGA group. So, literally, everybody that votes for me and everybody that donates for me can't be part of his club. You can't win a presidency like that. And then he goes and pushes the RNC to name him the nominee. All of that happened. I appreciate it because we raised $4 million in the process, but it goes to show, this is who he is. This is what he does

SORKIN: Can I ask you about and maybe it's threading a needle. I don't know. Maybe there's no needle to thread anymore, which is to say, he's been much more critical of you, but you arguably have now and maybe it's because you have to push back, have had to be more critical of him. And how you think about sort of how, you know, tonally even talking about him, because, at the same time, you look at the Chris Christies of the world, who made their campaign about going after him, whereas you, I would argue, up until maybe even a couple of weeks ago, were trying to avoid that part of the conversation. I don't know, maybe you'll disagree with my assessment.

HALEY: Well, there were 14 people in the race.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: And so my job was to get one fella out at a time.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: And so then we got 12 fellas out. And now it's a two-person race. So now, of course, I'm going to be going against him. When there were 14 in, it didn't make sense for me to do that.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: I had others I had to get out of the way. So, now you look at it. And now I'm telling the truth about him. I mean the truth of the fact is, we have to seriously look. This is a man that put us $8 trillion in debt in just four years. Think about that. This is a man who praised China's President Xi a dozen times after China gave us COVID. This is a man who now wants to go and put 10 percent tariffs across the board, raising taxes on every single American. Think about that for a second. That's what we're talking about.

HALEY: This is a man who continues to go and talk about himself and distract it with all the other things, but he, that night in New Hampshire, after the court case, he's never once talked about the American people. He's never once talked about how we're going to get the country back on track.

QUICK: But what would you do differently? What would you do differently in terms of the spending? Because Donald Trump didn't really spend like a Republican. He did things that gave money to a lot of places, and what would you do differently? Which of those programs would you pair back?

HALEY: You know, he didn't do anything that much different than Biden. He paid off people to get votes. You know, we saw it when he gave out the COVID stimulus checks, the same way we see Biden going and throwing out all this money. The, what I would do different is, everything you do with the economy is, it should be, how to get people less dependent on government. You look at the economy. Look at the economy under Trump. Yes, it was good, but at what cost? Look at the economy now under Biden. Everybody's talking about how good it is. But look at how government's grown. That's what you don't want.

QUICK: He did those things to buy votes, and it was effective.

HALEY: Absolutely. But, look, it's dangerous too. I'm not going to do things to buy votes. I'm going to be honest with the American people. We've got to let the American people know that what Donald Trump's about to do to you is going to raise every household expense by $2,600 a year.

SORKIN: Can I –

HALEY: They're going to raise in – they're going to raise the cost of anything from baby strollers to appliances under Donald Trump. Middle-class families can't afford that.

SORKIN: Let me ask you two policy questions that are in the news right now. One is immigration and what's happening at the border. There was a sense, maybe, that there could be some kind of deal made on the border. It sounds like Mitch McConnell is now saying that he's hearing effectively from President Trump, don't make a deal. It is better politically not to make a deal because it would, it would better effectively the chances of President Trump, by the way, it might better your chances as well, I don't know. So, where do you stand on that?

HALEY: Secure that border. I don't care what political chances it does, do the right thing. This is not the time to sit there and wait until November when you've got people coming through.

QUICK: Is the Senate bill the right thing?

HALEY: The thing is, when you look at the border deal -- and I'm not sure of all the details because it's been drip, drip. The one thing that causes me pause is that they don't have the remain in Mexico policy. You should not want any illegal immigrant to step foot on American soil, period. That has got to stop.

QUICK: But would you do nothing rather than the perfect because that's been the argument?

HALEY: I think that Republicans and Democrats are to blame on this. They need to get in a room and figure this out and not, not come out until they finish this. That's the problem is, they can do better. But think of

SORKIN: But do you think a, do you think a deal is worse for whoever actually becomes the Republican nominee, which is to say that right now there's a lot of criticism against this administration given what's happening at the border? If a deal is reached, does he, Biden, get the credit for that?

HALEY: I mean it's a shame because I don't think anybody should get credit. They should be embarrassed. What has Congress done? What has the president done on the border? You haven't seen anything. So now that you do this, you want us to praise you for doing the right thing that you should have done years ago? Like, why are we even talking about that? The problem in D.C., the problem with politics is, they all want to know who's going to get the credit and who's going to get the blame. And the American people fall to the wayside because of it. Start calling things like they are. That's why I've always spoken in hard truths. You may not like what I say, but I'm always going to tell you the truth. I think that's important.

SORKIN: Right.

QUICK: OK, but just back to the Senate bill, would you take it even if it doesn't have the remain in Mexico policy, because that's been the argument is, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And that's an age old conversation in Washington.

HALEY: But you know what that means. If they pass this, they'll leave it alone and they won't try and fix it more. We can't allow people to come across the border period. You've got people on the terrorist watch list. These are not people getting vetted. We can't be OK with that. So, I know people are saying, oh, but you've got a little something.

QUICK: Yes.

HALEY: No, you -- this is a national security threat. America's acting like it's September 10th. We've got to remember what September 12th felt like.

SORKIN: Talking about national security threats, three troops killed over the weekend and – and possibly 25 or 30 others injured on the border of Jordan and Syria. What would you be doing right about now in terms of what's happening in the Middle East? Would we be going to war? I mean I, you know --

HALEY: No, the goal is always to prevent war. What makes me angry is -- my husband's serving overseas. Military families want to know their loved ones are protected. Biden didn't protect them. And there have been 160 strikes. There shouldn't have been one. There shouldn't have been two. And you've got 160, and you've got dozens injured. We lost three heroes because Biden was scared of his own shadow. That's a truth.

SORKIN: But what would that – what would that mean in practice? When you say Biden – you say Biden didn't do something. What was that something that he should have been doing?

HALEY: The very first strike that hit, you punch and you punch back hard. What they should be doing is going after every ounce of production of those missiles. Wherever those missiles are, you take that out.

QUICK: Does – does that mean striking –

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: You keep doing – you take out the training sites. You go and you go after the leaders making these decisions.

SORKIN: But does that risk escalating a war?

QUICK: Does that mean -- does that mean striking Iran directly?

HALEY: It means striking the resources that are allowing them to hurt our troops. That's what you're doing. It's not going after the --

QUICK: They're backed by the – but they're backed by Iran.

HALEY: Absolutely.

QUICK: Iran says that they're not declaring the shots, but Iran's training them. They're providing intelligence. They're providing weapons.

SORKIN: And this goes back --

HALEY: There would be no Hamas without Iran, Hezbollah without Iran, or Houthis without Iran. Yes, you're going --

QUICK: But striking Iran is a really big escalation—

HALEY: You go after wherever those missiles are, the production, wherever it is, in Iraq and Syria, you take that out. Wherever it is in Lebanon that they're doing that, you take that out. You go after the leaders making the decisions. It's not after Iran the country, it's after the people who are making these decisions.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: When Soleimani was – was assassinated, it sent a chill up their spine.

SORKIN: Right.

HALEY: They literally -- it took their breath out. You have to be strategic.

SORKIN: Like –

HALEY: It's not starting a war, it's actually preventing war when –

SORKIN: But do you think you can accomplish that without escalating to the point of war? I mean there are some people who – who look at your candidacy and say, she's very hawkish. She's very hawkish. And she could bring us to a war.

HALEY: And why would I do that when my husband would be fighting in one? That's what you don't want. You actually prevent war. It's not being hawkish. What it is, is it's being smart. The problem that we've had is that everybody waits for it to get bad before they do something about it. Where did this all start? None of this would have started had Biden not lifted the sanctions on Iran. You allowed millions -- billions of dollars to go in from China, importing their oil. And what did that do? They gave money to the proxies to get these missiles, to do these things, to do the training, to invade Israel. All of that happened because they got money. And Biden still to this second hasn't increased sanctions on Iran. That's lunacy because you're just continuing to pay them for trying to now kill our soldiers. You, there are things we can do that are not war, but not having common sense, there's no excuse for that. And this is something where we've seen them do it with Iran, we saw him do it with Afghanistan. We're seeing him do it with Russia and Ukraine. You have to be tough. That doesn't mean starting a war, that actually means preventing war. But when countries see that you're tough and you're serious, they back off. By nature, they back off. Iran knows they can't beat America. They've always known that. But as long as they smell blood in the water, they're going to keep doing this.

QUICK: Governor Haley, want to thank you for coming by today.

HALEY: Thanks so much. Go to nikkihaley.com. We're going to finish this.

SORKIN: It's great to see you.

HALEY: Thank you.

SORKIN: Appreciate it very, very much