Can Nikki Haley Do the Right Thing?

How she treats Trump could decide the election.

(Photo by JULIA NIKHINSON/AFP via Getty Images)

NIKKI HALEY’S DECISION HAS LOOMED for more than a year, since she launched a presidential campaign in February 2023 to earn the votes of a party that belonged to Donald Trump. She will soon have to embrace his planned autocracy or choose to separate herself from the GOP and risk ending her political career.

Her choice could affect millions of votes. A Trump endorsement would tell disaffected Republicans who support her that abiding the former president’s quest for unchecked power is acceptable. Should she abstain from offering Trump her support, Haley would join his former vice president and multiple high-ranking officials from his first administration who have deemed him unfit to serve again. It would earn her instant MAGA banishment.

Republicans are talking to Haley and about her, when and whether she will endorse Trump, and even whether she could still end up as his running mate. Despite Trump’s statement to the contrary earlier this month, many pine for this for obvious reasons—a Trump/Haley ticket could win handily. Most Republicans not named Trump desperately want Haley in the tent come November.

Since leaving the race on March 6, Haley has disappeared from the public eye, save for an announcement that she has joined the Hudson Institute. On Wednesday she will give a foreign policy address there, and what she says could provide a clue about her intentions.

At a recent gathering she hosted for roughly a hundred of her campaign donors, Haley offered none. Noted in the reporting about the two-day gathering in Charleston was that Trump was only mentioned in passing. Politico reported: “The only time Trump’s name came up during the presentation to donors was in the context of the early state primaries the former president won before Haley bowed out of the race, according to attendees.”

Those donors are eager to see Haley run again in four years. But that will be determined by what she does this year. Haley has spent eight tortured years shamelessly flip-flopping on Trump—attacking him in the 2016 campaign then becoming his ambassador to the United Nations, predicting January 6th would be the end of him then declaring she would not run for president if he did, then running for president anyway when he did.

At the start of the campaign, Haley sounded like she was running for vice president, promising to support Trump as the nominee even if he were convicted of crimes. By the end of the campaign, she said she no longer felt obligated to support him, that he was responsible for failing to stop the violence on January 6th, and that she isn’t sure, if returned to office, that he will follow the Constitution.

Three days before dropping out of the primary Haley said she no longer felt bound by the loyalty pledge that the Republican National Committee had required of all candidates who wished to participate in the primary debates. Haley added that the RNC had changed hands since she agreed to that pledge to support the party’s eventual nominee. “No. I think I’ll make what decision I want to make,” she said.

Though it was a long time coming, Haley in the final days of her campaign finally criticized Trump, saying the things we all knew she had thought all along.

She torched him for his invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allied countries Trump found delinquent in fees, saying, “When you hear Donald Trump say in South Carolina a week ago that he would encourage Putin to invade our allies if they weren’t pulling their weight, that’s bone-chilling because all he did in that one moment was empower Putin.”

She called him “toxic,” said he lacked “moral clarity,” and questioned his mental fitness when he confused her with Nancy Pelosi. She sold “Barred Permanently” t-shirts for her campaign after Trump said anyone who donated to her was unwelcome, and “permanently barred” from MAGA.

And she was explicit about her feelings about Trump’s betrayal on January 6th in her final interview on Meet the Press on March 3:

You know, you have everybody from Fox News anchors to friends to family begging him to say something to get them to stop, including his vice president. And he was silent. . . . Anytime there is lawlessness, and you condone lawlessness, and you don’t do anything to stop lawlessness, he’s going to have to answer for that.

When Kristen Welker asked Haley if she thought Trump would follow the Constitution, Haley said:

I don’t know. You know, when you, when you go in and you talk about revenge, when you go and you talk about, you know, vindication, when you go and you talk about, what does that mean? Like, I don’t know what that means. And only he can answer for that. What I can answer for is I don’t think there should ever be a president that’s above the law. I don’t think that there should ever be a president that has total immunity to do whatever they want to do.

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WHY DOES HALEY STILL MATTER more than two months after she dropped out? She has earned roughly 20 percent of the votes in post-Super Tuesday primaries. This month, she won 21.7 percent in Indiana (128,000 votes); 21.7 percent in Maryland (57,000 votes); and 18.2 percent in Nebraska (38,000 votes).

In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—each of which held primaries after she dropped out—her vote totals (respectively 111,000, 78,000, and 158,000) were far bigger than the vote difference between Biden and Trump in the 2020 general election. Altogether, almost 4 million Americans have voted for Haley.

While Trump has ignored Haley’s “zombie” vote haul, the Biden campaign has begun to target her supporters.

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IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY Haley would endorse Biden, but she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t even have to go as far as Liz Cheney, who has as yet not endorsed Biden but has said, “We can survive bad policies. We can’t survive a president who goes to war with the Constitution.”

But it would be a great service to the republic if Haley just went as far as Mike Pence and simply refused to support Trump. That alone would signal a critical bloc of voters that his candidacy remains unacceptable. And while some of them will vote for Trump in the end, many won’t.

The most likely scenario is that Haley will offer a diluted endorsement of Trump designed to telegraph to her supporters that she doesn’t approve but is preserving her standing in the party for 2028 or 2032.

What Haley’s past equivocations tell us is to bet on her ambition, and not on a new willingness to sacrifice her dream of being president so that America can remain a democracy.

But to refuse to support Trump at all would be a powerful patriotic gesture from this military spouse and daughter of immigrants who said of Trump in 2021, “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Let’s hope Nikki Haley is haunted.