Haley endorses Walker in Georgia Senate race

“Let me get this straight - she endorsed our preferred candidate and you have a problem with that. Is that about right?”

You mean this Nikki Haley? Tell us what you like best about that opportunist.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-carolina-governor-nikki-haley-anyone-but-trump/

CHARLESTON, S.C. February 16, 2016—

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley says she may not endorse anyone ahead of Saturday’s first-in-the-South GOP primary, but if she does, it certainly won’t be Donald Trump.

Haley said Tuesday she’s still trying to make up her mind. But she said Trump represents “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president.”

Haley says Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She says governors want a president who will work with and fight for them, not come into their state and bash them. She called Trump’s comments “quite Obama-like.”

https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/17/politics/nikki-haley-donald-trump-south-carolina/index.html

February 17, 2016 CNN —
The Republican Party tapped South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to deliver its response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, but her most memorable jabs landed squarely on the GOP’s own Donald Trump. That’s something that didn’t escape – or please – some conservatives.

Haley took clear aim at the GOP front-runner, discussing her family’s immigrant experience while warning against rhetoric that would threaten “the dream that is America” for others.

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” Haley said from the governor’s residence in Columbia. “We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”

Haley never mentioned Trump by name, but the implication was clear. The billionaire, who has led the Republican race in most national polls for months, said after the Paris terror attacks he would consider creating a national database of American Muslims and later called for a temporary halt to Muslims entering the United States.

Speaking to reporters in South Carolina a day after Trump proposed the ban, Haley dismissed it as “unconstitutional” and “an embarrassment” to the GOP.

“It defies everything that this country was based on,” she said. “It’s just wrong.”

https://tinyurl.com/jyfewjhd

Politico February 12, 2021-
Make no mistake: Haley does want to be president. She told me no final decision has been made. But she has secured commitments from top party strategists, including pollster Jon Lerner and consultant Nick Ayers, men with a plan for making her America’s first woman president. She has used a non-profit to travel and raise funds, and recently launched a political action committee to turbocharge her activity. She has built a stump speech that’s an extension of her Trump-era tightrope routine. Though a formal launch is still two years off, Haley’s stealth campaign for the presidency has been underway for some time.

And yet, if Haley had simply wanted some separation from the president, she could have done it with less risk. She could have rebuked his conduct on January 6 alone, the way other Republican leaders had. Haley went well beyond that. In so doing, she instantaneously severed ties with Trump and his loyalists, forsaking her slow-and-steady theory of unifying the Republican Party.

This was encouraging—and deeply vexing. Haley told RNC members what they didn’t want to hear. Yet it took an invasion of the U.S. Capitol for her to speak a truth that she knew all along—a truth many Republicans knew all along, a truth that might have saved lives and kept the country from enduring a horrible ordeal.

Comparing her remarks to the RNC, versus those she made to me just weeks earlier, it was clear that two distinct versions of Haley were on a collision course. A few days later, I jumped on a flight to South Carolina and braced for impact.

don’t talk a lot about the Charleston tragedy, from a very personal level,” Haley said quietly, by way of explanation.

It was a gloomy Tuesday, January 12, and we were back on Kiawah Island, back in that same elegant country club. This time the room was darker. The Christmas tree was gone and so was the smile on Haley’s lips.

“But when Charlottesville happened, I was very triggered,” she said, recalling the fatal 2017 rally of white supremacists and the president’s coddling of them. “I know that bad things can happen. And I called [Trump] and I said, ‘You need to realize your words matter and what you say, and you think you’re saying, and what someone else may hear can be very different things. You have to understand that people can take that and hurt people with it.’

“He said, ‘Nikki, Nikki. This isn’t Charleston, this isn’t Charleston,’” Haley recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not saying this is Charleston. I’m saying that I know that certain people hear your words and will react to that and you have to be careful with that.’”

She took a breath. “Fast forward, I’m watching the television the morning of the 6th and I see Don Junior get up there,” she said, reciting the president’s son’s calls to action against Republican leaders, closing her eyes as if reimagining the scene. “And then I hear the president get up there and go off on Pence. I literally was so triggered, I had to turn it off. I mean, Jon [Lerner] texted me something and I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t watch it. I can’t watch it,’ because I felt the same thing. Somebody is going to hear that, and bad things will happen.”

I asked Haley whether she has spoken to Trump since January 6. She shook her head.

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley hissed, leaning forward as she spoke. “Mike has been nothing but loyal to that man. He’s been nothing but a good friend of that man. … I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”

At that moment an article of impeachment was being drafted in Congress. There was even pressure for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Haley rolled her eyes. “I think it’s a waste of time. And I think impeachment is a waste of time.”

So, I asked, how should the president be held accountable?

“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” Haley said. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”

I reminded her that Trump has been left for dead before; that the base always rallied behind him. I also reminded her that the argument for impeachment—and conviction—is that he would be barred from holding federal office again.

“He’s not going to run for federal office again,” Haley said.

But what if he does? Or at least, what if he spends the next four years threatening to? Can the Republican Party heal with Trump in the picture?

“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”

This was the most certainty I’d heard from any Republican in the aftermath of January 6. And Haley wasn’t done.

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” she said. “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.”

But do rank-and-file Republicans feel the same way? I told Haley about recent polling shared with me, showing his approval ratings in deep red districts hadn’t flinched.

“Listen, when I walked in that RNC room, I was not expecting a whole bunch of love from that speech,” she said. “I know how much people love Donald Trump. I know it. I feel it. Whether it’s an RNC room or social media or talking to donors, I can tell you that the love they have for him is still very strong. That’s not going to just fall to the wayside.”

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