CNN
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For Nikki Haley, the political calculus has shifted again.
Just recently, the former South Carolina governor argued that Donald Trump is too old, disorganized, “erratic” and prone to tantrums to ever run for president again and would never be able to beat President Joe Biden.
“I don’t feel the need to kiss the ring,” Haley said in February before suspending her primary campaign activities. “It has nothing to do with my political future.”
But on Wednesday, she gave the tacit endorsement that we all knew would happen sooner or later. Haley said that while Trump was not “perfect” on issues important to her, such as foreign policy and the national debt, Biden was a “disaster.”
“That’s why I’m going to vote for Trump,” said the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who was once a member of the president’s cabinet.
She left the post in 2018 after a friendly photo-op in front of the Oval Office fireplace and before she was tainted by her association with Trump’s mayhem. With 2024 looming, Ms. Haley said she would not run for president against her former boss, spurning Mr. Trump’s persistent ire, but she ran anyway.
Before she lost to Trump in her state’s primary earlier this year, Haley blasted Republicans who supported Trump even though they privately despaired of him. “The mob mentality is very powerful in politics,” she said. “Many Republican politicians have succumbed to it. … Of course, many of the politicians who now publicly support Trump are privately terrified of him. They know what a disaster he has been and will continue to be to our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud.”
Haley has now said publicly that she will vote for Trump. But if he wanted a future in a party dominated by presumptive candidates, he had little choice but to join the herd. This is the same decision made by Ted Cruz, whose wife was once publicly humiliated by Trump but has remained close to the former president ever since. Cruz, who graduated from Harvard Law School and is currently a U.S. senator from Texas, responded to CNN’s Caitlin Collins’ call Wednesday night to unconditionally accept the 2024 election results. I refused.
“If the Democrats win, I will accept the result. But no matter what happens, I’m not going to ignore the fraud,” Cruz said, before going on to say, in typical Trump fashion, that the 2020 campaign was not without fraud. It cited unsubstantiated claims that it was rampant.
The alternative is not much of a stretch. Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, once a rising Republican star, is an example of what happens to conservative foreign policy hawks who refuse to soften their warnings that President Trump is a danger to democracy.
There is every indication that Haley wants to run for president again once Trump finally leaves the stage, so rejecting him now would serve no personal political purpose other than, in principle, putting an end to her career. History may praise her for her selflessness, but power would be beyond her reach.
Ms. Haley’s actions will reinforce the impression that she always follows the political line that is most advantageous to her own ambitions. But if Biden wins in November, she could say she predicted Trump would lose. If Trump’s second term turns out to be a disaster, she says publicly that she predicts chaos. That would leave her in 2024 with a pre-Trump administration on foreign policy and the economy that seems closest to her own beliefs, even if she appears to be auditioning for the leadership of a party that doesn’t exist in any recognizable way. He may be in a position to try to return the Republican Party to its position.
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said Trump should never be allowed near the White House again and said he was disappointed in Haley’s decision. “I think she’s obviously made a political calculation that it’s in her own interest to support Donald Trump,” Bolton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.
Haley, who won Vermont and Washington, D.C., is not the only young Republican presidential candidate to undergo such a transformation while still harboring dreams of reaching the White House. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lashed out at Trump when his campaign lost momentum in frigid Iowa in January, then withdrew from the race much earlier than Haley. He occasionally supported Trump.
During the campaign, Haley argued that both Biden, who is 81, and Trump, who will turn 78 next month, were too old to be president, and called for candidates over 75 to undergo cognitive tests. On Wednesday, he decided to focus solely on Biden’s responsibilities. Questions have arisen as to whether her voters will follow her in Trump’s direction.
Since Haley suspended her campaign, tens of thousands of Republican primary voters have continued to cast ballots for her. The support is a living legacy of a campaign that positioned itself as a receptacle for Republicans who despise Trump and want an alternative candidate. Haley was particularly strong in suburban areas where the former president struggled the most, and Biden’s campaign has signaled its intention to win over this wavering Republican base in November. “There will always be a place for Haley in my campaign,” Biden said at a fundraiser in the battleground state of Georgia over the weekend.
But many of Haley’s voters confessed at events in New Hampshire and Iowa earlier this year that while they preferred her, if Trump beat her to become the nominee they would probably remain loyal Republicans. In that sense, Haley’s decision, while peppered with political expediency, may also be one that many of her supporters struggle with.
For Republicans who dislike Trump and are considering Biden, the choice this time is more complicated than last time. Biden is now the incumbent president whose track record and policies, including foreign and economic policies, are in direct conflict with many Republicans’ core beliefs. Memories of the chaos of the Trump administration are also fading. Traditional national security Republicans may also see world war and chaos, as well as Biden’s growing feud with the right-wing Israeli prime minister, as reasons to stick with their vote. “Many Republicans are making the same calculation because the Biden administration’s performance has been so bad,” Bolton said.
Haley said she would vote for Trump during her first major political speech since suspending her Republican presidential campaign at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Her presentation during the Q&A seemed illogical. She had just delivered a hard-line speech that combined Ronald Reagan’s Cold War hawkish stance with the Bush administration’s neoconservative undertones, but she was also a former leader who watered down Republican foreign policy norms with an “America First” strategy. He promised to vote for the president. Haley wants to vote for candidates who will “support our allies, hold our enemies accountable, and keep our borders safe,” she claimed. But during her first term, Trump often approached U.S. enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and for four years accused allies in Europe and Asia of piggybacking on the United States. He was blaming.
Mr. Biden, by contrast, has reinvigorated and expanded America’s alliances, including NATO, which Mr. Trump loathes. The Western alliance is now finding more direction than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Trump may say good things about immigration, but he recently derailed the most conservative border bill in decades. Apparently, he wanted to steal victory from Biden in an election year and protect his narrative that the nation is under siege.
Haley’s lack of enthusiasm in supporting Trump leaves several questions open, including whether she will agree to campaign and urge voters to support Trump. While she said she will vote for the former president, she urged him to take steps to appeal to voters. “Mr. Trump would be wise to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not think that they’re just with him. And I sincerely hope that he does,” she said. Despite his need to appeal to suburban voters, President Trump made no effort to appeal to Haley voters during his march for the nomination. And he was quick to deny recent reports that the former South Carolina governor could be on the shortlist for the vice presidential nomination.
But a reconciliation between the two political rivals would serve as a reminder not to take anything that happens in presidential primaries too seriously. Mr. Haley, after all, went from one extreme to the other during his campaign. For months, she offered only the mildest of condemnations of Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results to stay in power. Like her other Republican candidates, she was unable to solve the challenge of running against a former president who remains hugely popular with her supporters while avoiding alienating his supporters. Her outright antagonism against Trump in the New Hampshire snow was her last resort move as it became clear that there was no path for her to win the nomination.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on February 1, Haley said Trump had been through a “chaotic moment” a few days earlier, scolding him for “throwing a tantrum” when he tried to throw her out of the race the night she won the New Hampshire primary. During a speech in Columbia, South Carolina, Haley asked the audience, “Do you really think you can beat Joe Biden after spending all this money on legal fees? You can’t.” On February 12, Haley told Tapper that Trump has “completely lost his mind” and accused him of siding with Putin over NATO allies.
“For better or worse, there’s chaos in[Trump’s]wake,” Haley complained at nearly every event. “There’s too much division in our country, too many threats around the world, for us to ever have chaos again.”
But that’s the “mess” she plans to vote on in November.
