Trump stays mostly silent on Haley after she backs him

A day after Nikki Haley announced that she will vote for Donald Trump this fall — and again urged him to appeal to her supporters — the former president spoke for more than 90 minutes on Thursday and didn't mention her once to the crowd.

It's as though Haley — despite her still-sizable constituency, which he will need in November — is not even a factor to Trump. At his rally Thursday evening in the Bronx, he offered remarks on everything from his record as president to the debates he has agreed to with President Joe Biden. He complained about the cleanliness of the New York subway system and the cost of bacon. But he said nothing about his latest high-profile supporter. And in the more than 24 hours since Haley broke her silence on her general election preference, none of the three dozen posts shared from Trump’s Truth Social account mentioned her at all.

It was only following Trump’s speech, in response to a question from a local TV reporter, that he said, "I appreciated what she said. You know, we had a nasty campaign, it was pretty nasty. But she's a very capable person, and I'm sure she's going to be on our team in some form, absolutely.”

For Haley, Trump’s non-engagement could be the ideal response to what appears to be a calculated, gradual rollout of her support for him — after spending two months declaring that “Donald Trump is the problem,” that he is “unhinged,” that he failed to stand up to dictators, and that she felt “no need to kiss the ring.”

Before Thursday, the last comment Trump made about Haley was earlier this month, when he said she was “not under consideration” for running mate, despite a news report claiming Haley was in contention for the role.

Haley’s announcement that she would support Trump on Wednesday was hardly robust, with the former UN ambassador saying he had “not been perfect” on many policies, but that Biden is a “catastrophe.” And between her statement and Trump’s lack of response on Thursday, there was little evidence of an organized effort by the former president to court Haley or her supporters — who he will need in the general election and who Haley said he “would be smart to reach out to.” Haley’s decision to get behind Trump was not unexpected, a near-requirement of any Republican politician vying for relevancy in the Trump-era GOP.

“It’s not a shock,” said veteran Republican strategist Whit Ayres, referring to Haley conceding that she would vote for Trump. “A number of her supporters would have preferred that she not do that, but I understand the reasoning behind it.”

“She's obviously trying to maintain viability within the Republican Party,” Ayres continued, adding that it’s “hard to know how … the people who voted for her after she dropped out are going to react to it. I just don’t know the answer to that.”

Haley is well practiced in the art of condemning and then praising Trump, doing so in multiple cycles over the last eight years. She initially opposed his 2016 candidacy, was later appointed to his administration, said after Jan. 6, 2021 that the GOP “shouldn’t have listened to him” but then pivoted later that year by saying “we need him in the Republican Party.” After asserting she would not run for president if Trump did, in 2023 she became the first Republican to challenge him in the primary.

While Trump remained mostly silent on Haley, the reaction of his closest allies in Congress was mixed.

“I know a lot of people are going to attack Nikki Haley for not getting on board sooner,” Sen J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told Fox News. “My attitude is we’re thrilled to have Nikki Haley’s support for the Republican Party in 2024.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), meanwhile, called her “Desperate Neocon Nikki Haley” and wrote in a social media post that Haley was trying to “weasel her way into Trump’s next administration.”

Avowed anti-Trumpers, from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, to former national security adviser John Bolton and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, unloaded on what they described as Haley’s opportunism and about-face to save her political future within the Republican Party.

“I know that Nikki Haley believes, like I do, that Trump is unfit and that he should never be president,” former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh told POLITICO, adding that if she said that publicly at this point, “her career as a Republican is over.”

Walsh, who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, said he would have been “shocked” had Haley announced she would not vote for Trump, as Walsh and a handful of other former Republicans have done in recent years.

“This is why she's been very successful. She's very ambitious, and she's been all about her career,” Walsh said. “And if you're about your career and you're a Republican in this moment in time, you have to kiss Donald Trump's ring. And that's what she did.”

Haley’s eventual embrace of Trump ahead of the fall general election came as no shock to operatives working to steer Haley supporters to Biden.

“Most people that were following Nikki Haley’s campaign expected her to either enthusiastically endorse or tepidly endorse” Trump, said Robert Schwartz, the executive director of the Haley Voters Working Group, who also serves as an adviser on the Haley Voters for Biden super PAC. “I think some were hoping she would stay quiet, but no one was expecting she would go to Biden.

“In that range of potential endorsements, I think it was a very tepid endorsement — if you even call it an endorsement.”