Nikki Haley announced she “will be voting for” former President Donald Trump against President Joe Biden in their fall rematch.
The former U.N. ambassador’s comments end the longest Republican holdout while warning her former boss and rival not to take her supporters for granted.
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“Biden has been a catastrophe,” Haley said at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., in her first public appearance since conceding the 2024 Republican presidential primary contest. “So, I will be voting for Trump.”
Haley stipulated that “Trump has not been perfect” on the policies that drive her voting preferences — border security, maintenance of strategic alliances, and the need for “a president who would support capitalism and freedom.”
Those remarks followed a set-piece foreign policy speech in which she argued that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza flow from the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
“Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech: Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me, and continue to support me, and not assume that they’re just going to be with him,” she said. “And, I genuinely hope he does that.”
Haley didn’t specify the form that such a gesture to her voters should take. Trump, in response to media reports that suggested she could emerge as his vice presidential running mate in the fall, wrote on social media that “Nikki Haley is not under consideration for the V.P. slot, but I wish her well!”
The former president’s Truth Social post gave Haley the social media dismissal that she avoided during her two-year tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — a political accomplishment in an administration in which multiple other senior officials were fired by a presidential tweet. Yet the former South Carolina governor, who said in 2021 that she would not run for president of Trump sought a return to the White House, was the last of the GOP upstarts to abandon her effort to defeat him in the primaries.
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“At the beginning she was very nice, very respectful, and then– she’s gone crazy and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump told conservative talk show host Mark Levin in March. “She’s gone haywire…and she’s a very angry person, so we’ll see if she straightens out. Maybe she will.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.