Nikki Haley is playing it nice after being publicly snubbed by Donald Trump in a post which stated that she and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo will both be excluded from his second administration.
Haley was Trump’s last remaining rival in the Republican primary election earlier this year.
In the span of a few months, she had a rapid change of heart, moving from saying that the former president was unfit for office and accusing him of demeaning service members to endorsing him on stage at the Republican National Convention.
But it wasn’t enough of a public bending of the knee for the former president, who wrote on Truth Social on Saturday that Haley would not be “invited” to join his team in any role over the next four years. Haley and Pompeo both were seen as scions of the party’s neoconservative wing and represented some of the first Trump presidency’s more hawkish foreign policy positions.
“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation. I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” wrote the former president on his social media platform.
Haley responded to the snub in a post on X: “I was proud to work with President Trump defending America at the United Nations. I wish him, and all who serve, great success in moving us forward to a stronger, safer America over the next four years."
It’s somewhat of an unsurprising development for Haley, who like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s other rival in the primary race, took a serious amount of abuse from Trump during her short-lived bid.
Pompeo’s inclusion is a bit stranger, as he has rarely challenged the former president publicly, but the ex-secretary has very much sought to maintain a national profile over the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency while positioning himself as a key voice in his party’s foreign policy sphere.
Both DeSantis and Haley were initially thought to have been snubbed for speaking slots at the RNC in June, but ultimately did end up addressing the Trumpworld-aligned crowd at the last minute. Haley, in her speech, reached out to her supporters and implored them to vote for the former president.
“I know there are people out there who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100 percent. I happen to know some of them,” said Haley.
“I want to talk to them tonight. My message is simple: You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him.”
Within weeks of that speech, Biden would be replaced by Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic Party’s ticket. The vice president would go on to make a largely unsuccessful bid for Haley’s Trump-weary Republican voters, a move which involved championing the endorsements of neoconservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Local Democratic leaders and analysts now believe that tactic may have been deployed at the expense of motivating the party’s core voters and constituencies that supported Democrats in past cycles.
