Nikki Haley promised to vote for Trump
Nikki Haley has said she will vote for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, a notable show of support given their intense and often personal rivalry during the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
That said, Haley also made it clear that she believes Trump has work to do to bring voters who supported her during the campaign and continue to vote for her in the primaries to his side.
“I will vote for Trump,” Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
“Having said that, I’m not retracting what I said in my speech about suspending my participation in the presidential race,” Haley added. – Trump would be wise to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, rather than assume they will just follow him. And I sincerely hope he does.”
The comments, in her first public appearance since her withdrawal from the presidential race, are another signal of the near consolidation of Republican Party support for Trump, even from those who in the past have labeled him – “a threat.”
Haley dropped her bid for the Republican Party nomination two months ago, but did not immediately endorse Trump, accusing him of “creating chaos and ignoring the importance of U.S. alliances abroad” and wondering “if 77-year-old Trump is ”too old to be president again.
Trump, for his part, has repeatedly mocked her, saying she has “bird brains.” He stopped those attacks after he won enough delegates in March to become the presumptive Republican nominee.
Trump’s campaign headquarters did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Haley’s statement.
Meanwhile, members of President Joe Biden’s campaign have been working to get her supporters, whom they consider to be true swing voters, on her side.
According to people familiar with the plans but not authorized to discuss them publicly, Biden’s team is slowly organizing a group called “Republicans for Biden” that will eventually include dedicated staffers and focus on the hundreds of thousands of Haley voters in each battleground state.
That said, Haley made several criticisms in a speech Wednesday at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank she recently joined when she re-emerged on the political scene.
The speech was about Joe Biden’s foreign policy and his actions regarding the problem at the U.S.-Mexico border.