As Donald Trump heads toward his third consecutive presidential nomination, he’s being backed by a parade of Republicans from every ideological persuasion. But there are some conspicuous exceptions, such as former 2024 primary rivals Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley. The first two dropped out before voters voted in circumstances that would make crawling back to Trump intensely humiliating, if not impossible. Haley’s situation is more interesting: She was the last Trump opponent standing and is still getting a small but non-negligible number of votes in GOP presidential primaries despite not actively campaigning.
Now, there’s a significant amount of speculation about whether the former South Carolina governor will eventually bend the knee to Trump, as the Associated Press observes:
Nikki Haley is perhaps the highest-profile Republican in the nation who has refused to fall in line and endorse Donald Trump’s presidential bid …
If Haley submits to Trump, as so many of his GOP critics have done, she also risks destroying her own coalition of independents, moderates and anti-Trump Republicans, who are still showing up to support her in low-profile primary contests from deep-red Indiana to deep-blue Maryland …
Haley’s decision on Trump in the coming months will be closely watched not just by her supporters, but by allies of Trump and President Joe Biden. What she decides to do — and whether her coalition follows — could have a profound impact on this year’s general election and her future as a top-tier Republican whose brand appeals to many people outside her party.
It’s worth remembering that the size and shape of Haley’s “coalition” are a bit hazy, though in the primaries the group definitely included non-Republicans who were voting against Trump rather than for the only other candidate on the ballot. More to the point, if Haley wants the credit or blame for keeping Trump from becoming the 47th president, the obvious thing for her to do is to endorse Biden rather than simply standing aside.
The odds are very high, however, that she’ll come around and endorse Trump for the third consecutive time. She has a long history of dissing Trump when he’s down and leaping back on his bandwagon when he’s up, most notably in 2016, when she accepted an early appointment as his ambassador to the United Nations after tepidly endorsing his general-election candidacy, and in 2021, when she confidently tossed him into the dustbin of history after the events of January 6 before temporarily rejoining the MAGA ranks.
There’s a more recent precedent for Haley as well: that moment in the first Republican presidential debate in August 2023, when she was one of six candidates who raised their hands, indicating they’d honor a pledge to support Trump as the nominee even if he’s convicted of a crime. Upon suspending her own campaign in March, Haley explained her failure to endorse him on the spot as reflecting her desire to see if he would show her supporters they had a place in the GOP. Although Trump hasn’t been eager to make any uncharacteristically gracious gestures, she set a pretty low threshold for him to meet, and it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t welcome her back into his good graces in exchange for an endorsement. After all, he’s still considering Marco Rubio as a running mate, and Little Marco once publicly suggested the infamous playboy was underendowed.
Why would Haley want to relent and endorse Trump? Because it’s pretty clear she still imagines a national political career for herself (she is, after all, only 52), and you don’t get one of those if you don’t back your party’s presidential nominee.
That’s been true for a very long time — probably since 1916, when Republicans invited supporters of Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy back into the party fold. Trump isn’t the first presidential nominee to horrify many of his fellow partisans. Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 shocked conventional Republicans to their core, particularly after he voted against the Civil Rights Act. Yet his great liberal Republican opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, the object of vivid demonstrations of hatred by Goldwater delegates at that year’s Republican Convention, eventually campaigned with the Arizonan despite the certainty that he would be beaten like a drum in the general election. Similarly in 1972, doomed Democratic nominee George McGovern, considered so dangerous a radical that the AFL-CIO refused to endorse him against Richard Nixon, was backed by all his former rivals and pretty much every Democratic pol with a pulse.
And lest we forget, in 2016 Trump himself was a far more controversial candidate in terms of Republican orthodoxy than he is today and was widely, almost universally, expected to lose handily to Hillary Clinton, particularly after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, making the man’s profane piggishness abundantly clear. Yet the party’s potentates eventually lined up behind him. The exceptions were mostly has-beens like the two Presidents Bush and the other would-be President Bush (Jeb!) along with lots of their over-the-hill advisers and appointees.
Eight years into the Trump era, the shock over his nasty personal traits and his ideological heresies has worn off, and nobody doubts he can win. So if Haley withholds her endorsement of Trump, she will be very much alone. Had she wanted to leave the Republican Party, she had an expedient way to do so by accepting the pleas of the No Labels organization to accept its nomination, which would have given her robust ballot access, some generous new donors, and probably an impressive initial showing in general-election polls. But she said “no,” touting history as a Republican and as a conservative and expressing horror at the idea of having to snuggle with a Democratic running mate.
It’s possible that Haley is so certain Trump will eventually be held in contempt by Republicans, and so confident that her brand of old-school, pre-Trump conservatism is the wave of the future, that she will take the supreme risk of refusing to endorse him. More likely, she will once again reconsider the negative things she has said about the 45th president, call him infinitely better than Joe Biden, and go along with the crowd.
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