Haley and DeSantis still can’t solve their Trump problem as time runs short in GOP race

A weekend of ferocious political exchanges laid out the tumultuous reality of the 2024 White House campaign less than a year from Election Day.

The fight for the GOP nomination is about far more than a horse race between candidates. Its outcome will decide whether the country faces an extraordinary general election – which one potential nominee, ex-President Donald Trump, would fight while facing multiple criminal trials and promising a presidency of retribution that could shake US democracy as never before.

Time is quickly ebbing for one of his distant Republican rivals to recast the race less than two months before voting begins. The weekend brought more evidence that other prominent candidates have yet to solve the core question of the GOP primary season: How to exploit Trump’s greatest general election weakness – his lawlessness and criminal exposure – without alienating GOP voters.

Just days after Trump was accused of echoing Nazi propaganda and as he firms up plans to use the presidency as a tool of personal vengeance, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out her most strident criticism of Trump yet. But her euphemistic language only highlighted her political dilemma and underscored Trump’s dominance of the primary.

Haley said in Iowa that she didn’t agree with Trump’s recent comments referring to political opponents as “vermin,” which had drawn Nazi analogies from the White House and some other critics of the ex-president. She also tried to allude to the potential uproar of a second Trump term without referring to the ex-president’s coming criminal trials or his attempt to subvert the will of voters by staying in power after he lost the 2020 election.

“It’s the chaos of it all, right? I think he means well. But the chaos has got to stop,” said Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations. “So it’s not…