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As her onetime opponent looked on, Nikki Haley took to the stage on Tuesday and declared that a man she said was mentally diminished and unqualified for elected office should be her party’s nominee for president.
It was a moment that would have been galling anywhere but the modern Republican Party, and that’s exactly who Haley addressed onstage in Milwaukee as she made clear that she sees a political future in a MAGA-fied GOP.
The former governor of South Carolina spoke for just a few minutes onstage, an address that was something of a surprise given that it had initially appeared that she would not attend the gathering. But, said Trump asked him to speak in the name of “unity,” which has been Trump's call since he was wounded by a bullet on Saturday.
"I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period," Haley told a cheering audience, which showed none of the anti-Haley vitriol evident during the primary race.
Though she did much to eliminate the daylight between her and the former president, Haley directed her remarks at her former supporters and political independents who don’t fit so easily under the MAGA tent.
Pointing to Joe Biden’s hoarse and mentally-wandering debate performance, she argued “a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris”, his vice president, whom she said would ruin the country after just one day as 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.”
It was far from what Haley was saying earlier this year when it became clear that she was the only candidate who would even have a shot of being competitive in the Republican primary after Iowa; at the time, the former governor was giving her harshest criticisms of her ex-boss to date and made a number of statements indicating that her differences with Trump went beyond policy.
The former president, she was arguing this spring, was no better suited to the executive office than Biden, for many of the same reasons: a perceived diminishing of mental faculties, as well as other issues like his temperament and respect for the position.
She would even go as far as saying that she did not “trust” Trump to keep US troops out of harm’s way, a searing critique for any politician but especially for an intra-party spat.
"He showed that with that kind of disrespect for the military, he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them," she said in February.
“The problem now is he is not the same person he was in 2016," she continued in that interview. "He is unhinged; he is more diminished than he was, just like Joe Biden’s more diminished than what he was.
Angry at Trump for attacking her husband’s military service, she continued: "This wasn’t a slip of the tongue for Trump. When he goes off his teleprompter, that’s him speaking from the heart, and it’s a pattern.”
But on Tuesday there was zero sign of that version of Haley. She was once again welcomed into the Trumpworld fold — or at least tolerated onstage for a few minutes.
Her strongest line of the night, which elicited a standing ovation, was a direct reversal of her past criticism on Trump’s respect for the military.
Pointing to the ongoing conflict of Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, echoing claims from other right-wingers who have argued that Biden failed to provide the deterrence against Russia that Trump supposedly represented. It also effectively raked the entire Bush-era neoconservative foreign policy doctrine, to which Haley was once seen as a champion, over the coals.
“Strong presidents don’t start wars,” Haley told the crowd. “They prevent wars.”
