Nikki Haley suspends campaign: Why won’t Haley endorse Trump for president?
Haley dropped her bid for the GOP nomination but didn’t throw her support behind Trump saying he needs to “earn the votes” of those who didn’t support him.
Presidential hopeful, Nikki Haley, will reportedly throw in the towel on Wednesday after she failed to make any major gains on Super Tuesday. Of the fifteen states that held primaries yesterday, she only managed to win one of them, Vermont.
With all the rest voting overwhelmingly for Trump, there was no real pathway for her to the Republican presidential nomination. She was the last person challenging the former president for the party’s top spot on the 2024 ballot. Despite stepping aside, she said that she won’t step inline with her former boss, as had been previously reported.
Why won’t Haley endorse Trump for president?
Haley told the crowd assembled that she has “always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee” but that she would not give her endorsement following the advice of Magaret Thatcher. “Never just follow the crowd, always make up your own mind,” she quoted the late conservative British Prime Minister.
She said that “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes” of those who did not support him in the party and beyond. “And I hope he does,” she added.
Haley’s stance on Trump became more aggressive late in her campaign
In the final days of her campaign, Haley became more defiant in her stance against her former boss and was less afraid of taking him on head-to-head. This was a change from the beginning of her run for the White House when she often said Trump was “the right president at the right time.”
Haley failed to be critical of the GOP frontrunner for much of the run-up to the primaries while she and the also-rans duked it out. She would often simply say the “I agree with a lot of his policies, but the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” That changed after Ron DeSantis dropped out leaving her as the last challenger to the former president for the Republican nomination.
She questioned his mental fitness after he confused her with Nancy Pelosi at a rally in January. “He’s going on and on mentioning me several times as to why I didn’t take security during the Capitol riots. Why I didn’t handle January 6 better,” she asked. “I wasn’t even in DC on January 6. I wasn’t in office then.”
More recently, she has said that both Trump and Biden are too old to be president saying that “there needs to be an alternative.” Furthermore, Haley warned the GOP about the risks of embracing Trump, predicting that the party would lose in November if he were on the ticket. As well, that he is too chaotic and consumed by grievances to send back to the White House for a second four-year term.