Haley ran a near perfect race. She just couldn’t figure out Trump.

Few presidential candidates in recent memory have been as outwardly disciplined as Nikki Haley.

The former U.N. Ambassador spent two years preparing to launch her bid for the White House. And, over the course of 13 months, her stump speech barely changed — down to the same pauses, the same inflections on the same words, the same laugh she conjured up when she got to the line about Congress needing to experience VA health care for themselves. (“It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen. Guaranteed!”)

Her debate performances were so commanding she at times left her rivals stuttering. Her answers on tricky subjects like abortion managed to expertly evade getting nailed down on specifics. With the exception of her Civil War gaffe and muddled messaging last week on Alabama’s IVF ruling, Haley rarely went off script. Even her advance team’s work was widely hailed among campaign veterans as detailed and superior to the competition.

But there was one subject that Haley couldn’t handle. And it proved, ultimately, to be her undoing: How does a Republican tackle Donald Trump?

Haley never found the right answer. And she tried at least a few different approaches. She deferred to him and flattered him. She apologized for him and chastised him. She ignored him and confronted him. Ultimately, she seemed bewildered by him.

Sitting around a conference table with D.C. reporters in a Georgetown hotel last Friday, Haley was asked whether she would continue to criticize Trump once she bowed out of the race. The formula she seemed to have grown comfortable with did not prepare her for it.

“I don’t know,” she muttered.

Haley isn’t the only one confounded by this question. But the suspension of her presidential campaign on Wednesday nevertheless provided the sharpest illustration to date of the futility of trying to undo Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. There is no successful way to do it, and often ostracism for those who try.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him,” Haley said after congratulating Trump on his primary victory, but withholding an immediate endorsement. “And I hope he does that.”

As she took the makeshift stage inside her Daniel Island campaign headquarters, Trump was already insulting her online. And minutes after Haley ended her brief remarks, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the most prominent elected Republican to hold out on endorsing Trump this cycle — fell in line and offered his support.

What looked, just a year and a half ago, like a prime opportunity for a new GOP standard bearer to win over hordes of Republican voters as Trump spent his days on a golf course, was simply a pipe dream. More than anyone else’s, Haley’s candidacy — her traditional campaign approach, the discipline of her advisers, the big money she attracted as she built her coalition — raises the question of whether there was any political solution for defeating Trump.

“It’s hard to say you’re never going to run against the guy, and then run against him. And it’s hard to do that and then not really go full-throated at him,” said Mike DuHaime, a longtime adviser to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who worked as a senior adviser to his 2024 presidential campaign.

“What I’ve learned from Trump world, no one’s ever going to be as vicious as he is, but you better come close if you want to have a shot,” DuHaime said.

Haley, to be sure, has criticized Trump over the last eight years, in particular when he first emerged as a force within the Republican Party during his 2016 run. She called him, at the time, “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” repudiating his comments about immigrants and white supremacists and endorsing Marco Rubio — and then Ted Cruz — before going on to join Trump’s administration months later.

It was a cycle that would play out again and again. Like many other prominent Republicans, Haley slammed Trump and questioned his place in the GOP in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Months later, she walked it back. That same year, she vowed not to run against Trump for president, before ultimately becoming his first opponent to do so after Trump entered the race.

And Haley vowed last year to support Trump, even as a convicted criminal, were he to become the party’s nominee. In recent days, Haley said she no longer felt bound to her pledge to back the eventual GOP nominee.

On the trail, Haley would pair criticisms of Trump’s policies with compliments about his accomplishments. For most of her campaign, Haley on the stump criticized Trump’s record only in passing, even as he continued to dominate the race. Even one of her commonly repeated lines about Trump, DuHaime noted — “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him” — took the blame off Trump.

“Chaos isn’t following him around. It’s not a rain cloud over his head. He’s doing it,” DuHaime said of Haley’s script. “You have to be willing to say, ‘He’s a bad president.’”

Haley wasn’t the only candidate who failed at taking on Trump. Others, of course, came and tried, likewise contorting themselves on matters of policy, principle and personality to try to appeal to a base that didn’t actually want to repudiate Trump.

But Haley was the first candidate to enter the 2024 Republican primary after Trump, and the last to exit before he clinched the nomination. She was the only one who got the long-awaited head-to-head matchup.

Haley made history in her bid against Trump, becoming the first woman to win a GOP presidential primary — and the only Republican to beat Trump in any contest since he became president.

But it wasn’t close to enough. Her candidacy became the latest, vivid illustration of the contortions and sacrifices that one must make to be a Republican in the Trump era. And there may be more pain to endure, as Haley decides whether to endorse Trump before the general election.

“She certainly has been as schizophrenic as any politician in America about Trump over the last eight years,” said Jason Roe, a former adviser to Rubio’s presidential campaign.

Her approach to Trump, it appeared to Roe, was “calculated based on her ambitions, not on Trump.”

“He and his behavior have been a relative constant over the last eight years,” Roe said. “She and her career have not been a constant.”