The fiercest Republican campaign isn’t taking place between the presidential hopefuls in Iowa or New Hampshire this month, but rather in the backstage fight over who would be Donald Trump’s running mate. Or more to the point: who will not be Trump’s pick.

As Nikki Haley emerges as the former president’s most formidable opponent in the coming states, and toughens her rhetoric, her Trumpworld foes are intensifying their own efforts to block her from the consolation prize of the vice presidency.

Haley’s critics have even privately warned Trump that, were he to make Haley first in line to the presidency, he’d effectively be setting himself up for an intra-party coup, as GOP senators would use any legal or political pretext to remove him from office and elevate the more old guard-aligned Haley.

“Nikki Haley as VP would be an establishment neocon fantasy and a MAGA nightmare,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told me. “On Day One she would convert the Naval Observatory into an anti-Trump, resistance headquarters, undermining him at every step.”

The Stop Nikki effort is so forceful because Trump’s decision will go to the heart of the party’s debate over its identity.

There’s the obvious — the term-limited Trump selecting an Oval Office heir — but it’s not only succession issues that’s sparking the Haley pushback.

Her selection as vice presidential nominee also amounts to a proxy war in the equally ferocious intra-party clash over foreign policy. Republican hawks see Haley as one of their own while GOP non-interventionists such as Gaetz are appalled that Trump would consummate his nomination by picking a Republican whose national security views are anathema to America First devotees.

Look no further than the president’s eldest son, perhaps the loudest opponent of Haley’s selection, who immediately followed her on stage Monday at a Des Moines caucus site and blistered her foreign policy worldview.

“Nikki Haley wants to be in every war the world has to offer,” said Donald Trump Jr., vowing that with his father as president again America will not send the “next generation to die in yet another never-ending war.”

The preemptive war against Haley, as it were, is not lost on the former president’s closest hawkish ally.

“The same people who don’t like her don’t like me,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham........

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