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Nikki Haley changed her mind this week on a possible 2024 presidential candidacy, saying she will make a decision to run that does not depend on former President Donald Trump’s decision to run for another term himself.
Showing how delicately Republican presidential candidates must dance in Trump’s shadow, the former UN ambassador told the Wall Street Journal the ex-president was a friend she would consult before launching his own candidacy for the White House. But she also said she disagreed with him that the 2020 election was stolen.
“There was election fraud, but I don’t think the numbers were so big that they tilted the vote in the wrong direction,” Haley said in an interview with The Journal on Tuesday.
Haley sharply criticized Trump after the deadly Jan.6 riot on Capitol Hill, which sought to overturn the election results, but she has since softened her tone.
“His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” Haley said in a speech to the Republican National Committee on Jan. 7, in the wake of a violent mob of Trump supporters – spurred by conspiracy theories of the then president – stormed the United States Capitol. “It is deeply disappointing.”
“He took a path he shouldn’t have,” she added in an interview with Politico. “We shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that happen again.”
In April, however, Haley appeared poised to let a new Trump presidency happen again, telling The Associated Press that she would not run for president in 2024 if he did.
“I wouldn’t be running if President Trump did, and I would talk to him about it,” she said at the time.
In her interview with the Journal, Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, gave herself more leeway to launch her own presidential bid, regardless of what Trump does.
“In early 2023, if I decided that there is a place for me, if I decided that there is a reason to move, I would pick up the phone and meet with the president,” she said. “I would talk to him and see what his plans are.” I would tell him about my plans. We would work on it together.
She also made it clear that Trump is welcome to join the GOP whether he is a candidate or not.
“He has a strong legacy of his administration,” Haley said. “He has the ability to elect strong people, and he has the ability to move the ball, and I hope he will continue to do so. We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the pre-Trump era.
Haley isn’t the only possible Republican presidential candidate to walk a fine line when it comes to Trump, who remains popular among GOP voters despite being a lightning rod of controversy among the electorate at large.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was the target of vitriol and violent rhetoric during the January 6 riot on Monday, dismissed continued media attention to the attack.
“I know the media want to distract from the failed Biden administration agenda by focusing on a January day,” Pence told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They want to use this someday to try to demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who thought we could be strong and prosperous again and have supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.”
Trump, in an attempt to bolster his baseless claims that the election was stolen, falsely claimed that Pence could stop the constitutionally mandated certification of the electoral vote. Some of the Trump supporters who breached the Capitol could even be heard chanting “Hang Mike Pence! Trump himself was very critical of his own vice president at the time.
Yet now, just like Haley, Pence has tried to position himself as a friend of Trump’s, claiming that the two paths have separated “amicably” and “have spoken a number of times since we both had left our functions “.
“You can’t spend almost five years in a political hole with someone without developing a strong relationship,” he said.
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