Nikki Haley, 52, has never seriously challenged Donald Trump in the polls.
Charleston, South Carolina:
For much of the 2024 presidential campaign, Nikki Haley spoke fondly of her two years as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Donald Trump.
She often tells voters that Trump is “the right president at the right time.”
But when Haley suddenly found herself going head-to-head with the Republican front-runner, who hurled a series of insults at her, she responded with a barrage of attacks. She now says Trump, 77, is too old and too chaotic to be returned to the White House for a second four-year term.
Haley’s evolution from Trump aide to primary rival late in the race for the Republican nomination has made her the standard-bearer for the party’s dwindling anti-Trump faction.
Her defiant stance against her former boss won her support from some independents and moderate Republican voters, as well as from donors who poured tens of millions of dollars into her campaign in the final months.
Haley, 52, who has never seriously challenged Trump at the polls, will suspend her campaign on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with her plans.
By the time she decided to quit, she had been abandoned by some of her former allies and had no clear political future in a party dominated by the man who will now lead her presidential campaign.
Even so, Haley’s rise has been remarkable. Haley, the only woman in the Republican race, has been stuck in single digits in polls for much of the campaign and is overshadowed by better-known names in a crowded field, but she’s still better than All other candidates held out longer and emerged as Trump’s last remaining rivals. Polls of hypothetical general election matchups show her beating Democratic President Joe Biden.
“She moved from nuance to direct attack,” Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist from South Carolina, said in February.
“I wish she had done it sooner,” he added.
Haley’s political rise began in 2010 when she was elected governor of South Carolina, becoming the first woman in the Southern state to hold the position and the second person of Indian descent to serve as a U.S. governor. She served from 2011 to 2017.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, Haley endorsed both of his rivals and then said she would support Trump if he became the Republican nominee, even though she was “not a fan of him.”
She spent two relatively quiet years working for Trump at the United Nations and played a key role in withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. The deal was signed under Democratic President Barack Obama but is unpopular among conservatives.
She initially said she would not run for president in 2024 if Trump ran. When she changed her mind and decided to launch her campaign in February 2023, she called Trump out of courtesy and Trump later recalled blessing her.
Haley stuck to a policy-focused message on the campaign trail and sought to establish herself as the most capable foreign policy contender. While nearly all Republican candidates have taken a tough stance on China, Haley’s unabashed support for Ukraine stands in stark contrast to Trump, who has said the conflict is not central to U.S. national security.
It wasn’t until a series of fiery debate performances that began in late August that she really gained attention.
Several major donors, including hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin and Wall Street investor Stanley Druckenmiller, began reaching out to her for help, particularly with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis At a time when his campaign was in trouble, he had been seen as the Republican Party’s best candidate to get rid of Trump.
In November, AFP Action, a political advocacy network backed by billionaire Charles Koch, endorsed Haley. The organization deployed an army of thousands of live knockers and organizers and covered the airwaves for her.
By December, Haley had overtaken DeSantis in most national polls, unseating the former governor in second place, although Trump’s huge lead was never threatened.
Haley praised the former president as much as she criticized him during the campaign, so much so that she was often asked if she wanted to be his running mate — a question she called “extremely offensive.”
But as the field narrowed from about a dozen major candidates to just Haley and Trump in late January, their attacks on each other escalated.
Trump called her “bird brain” and “brain dead” and mocked the dress she wore to a New Hampshire primary party. He often refers to her in speeches and on social media using a mispronunciation and misspelling of her birth name, Nimarata.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire, he said Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was not “presidential timber.”
Haley fired back, slamming Trump for spending more than $50 million in campaign funds on legal fees and calling him a “grumpy old man.”
She calls him a liar and hints that he is getting old. Her campaign called him a “chicken” for refusing to debate her and even had one of her staffers wear an inflatable chicken suit at some events to emphasize the point.
Haley promised to “make America normal again” – a blistering attack on Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Her refusal to withdraw after losses in early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire angered the former president, and she sought support from all but one member of South Carolina’s congressional delegation in an attempt to show she was not favored in her home state. welcome. After she lost there too, she remained persistent, saying voters should make a choice, even as she seemed to acknowledge the race had become distant.
In the final days of the campaign, Haley embraced her status as an outsider, telling voters she didn’t need the support of other elected officials.
“None of the members of Congress around him have done anything for us,” she said at a campaign stop in South Carolina in February.
“Trump can have them.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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