CNN
—
For Nikki Haley, the political calculus has shifted again.
Just recently, the former South Carolina governor said that Donald Trump is too old, disorganized, “erotic” and prone to tantrums to be president again, Joe Biden. He claimed there was no way he could win against the president.
“I don’t feel the need to kiss the ring,” Haley said in February before suspending her primary campaign activities. “I have no concerns about my political future.”
But on Wednesday, she offered the tacit endorsement we all knew was coming sooner or later: Haley said Trump wasn’t “perfect” on issues important to her, like foreign policy and the national debt, but 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 served in the former president’s cabinet.
She left the job in 2018 after posing for a friendly photo in front of the Oval Office fireplace, before being tainted by her association with President Trump’s unrest. With 2024 just around the corner, Haley, in response to Trump’s persistent ire, said she would not run for president against her former boss, but she ran nonetheless.
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 is now vocal about voting for Trump. But if he wanted a future in a party dominated by nominees, he had little choice but to join the pack. Liz, the former Wyoming congresswoman who once emerged as a star in the Republican Party, is an example of what can happen to conservative foreign policy hawks who refuse to soften warnings that Trump is a threat to democracy.・Even if we emulate Mr. Cheney, we will not be able to open a new path.
After Trump finally leaves the stage, there is every indication that Haley wants to run for president again. Therefore, rejecting him now would serve no personal political purpose other than to put an end to her career in principle. History may praise her selflessness, but her power will remain beyond her reach.
Haley’s actions will reinforce the impression that she always adopts the political line that best serves her own ambitions. But if Biden wins in November, she could be saying she predicted Trump would lose. If Trump’s second term is a disaster, she could be saying she predicts chaos. That could put her in a position in 2024 to try to return the Republican Party to the pre-Trump positions on foreign policy and the economy that seem closest to her own beliefs, even as she appears to be auditioning for leadership of a party that doesn’t even exist in any recognizable way.
Former 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 clearly made a political calculation that it’s in her 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 she suspended her campaign, tens of thousands of voters in the Republican primary have continued to cast ballots for her. The support is a living legacy of a campaign in which she positioned herself as a receptacle for Republicans who despise Trump and want a different candidate. Haley has been particularly strong in suburban areas where the former president struggled the most. And the Biden campaign has signaled it intends to compete for this bloc of swing Republican voters in November. “There will always be a place for Haley voters in my campaign,” the president said at a fundraiser in the battleground state of Georgia over the weekend.
However, many Haley voters said at events in New Hampshire and Iowa earlier this year that they preferred Haley, but if Trump were to defeat her and become the nominee, they would probably be willing to leave the party as a loyal Republican. He confessed that he would continue to remain in the country. In that sense, Haley’s decision, although tinged with political expediency, may be one that many of her supporters are also concerned about.
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 announcement during the Q&A seemed illogical. She had just delivered a hardline speech that blended Ronald Reagan’s Cold War hawkishness with the neoconservative overtones of the Bush administration, and she was promising to vote for a former president who had gutted Republican foreign policy norms with his “America First” strategy. Haley insisted she wanted to vote for a candidate who would “stand by our allies, hold our enemies accountable, and secure our borders.” But Trump often cozied up to America’s enemies, like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, during his first term, and he accused European and Asian allies of piggybacking on the U.S. for four years.
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 for supporting Trump leaves several questions, including whether she will agree to campaign and encourage voters to support Trump. Although Haley said she would 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 are alone with him. And I I really hope he does,” she said. Despite his need to appeal to suburban voters, President Trump made no effort to appeal to Haley voters during his campaign for the nomination. And he quickly denied recent reports that the former South Carolina governor could be on the shortlist for vice president.
But any coordination between the two political rivals would serve as a reminder not to take what happens in presidential primaries too seriously. As it turns out, Haley went from one extreme to the other during his bid. She has spent months issuing only her mildest condemnations of President Trump, who sought to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power. Like her fellow Republican candidates, she was unable to solve the conundrum of how to run against a former president who remains hugely popular with her base while avoiding alienating her supporters. It was as a last resort, as it became clear that she had no path to winning the nomination, that she turned fully to Trump in the snowy New Hampshire state.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Feb. 1, Haley said Trump had been experiencing “confused moments” in the past few days and tried to push through on the night he won the New Hampshire primary. He said he scolded the former president for throwing a “tantrum” when he did so. She was out of the race. During her appearance in Columbia, South Carolina, Ms. Haley asked her audience: he’s not him On February 12, Haley told Tapper that Trump is “totally free” and accused the former president of siding with Putin over NATO membership.
“For better or for worse, chaos will continue after (President Trump),” Haley complained at almost every event. “There’s too much division in this country and too many threats around the world to allow us to descend into chaos again.”
But that’s the “mess” she’ll be voting for in November.
