Nikki Haley Finally Quits, Doesn’t Endorse Trump

Nikki McCann Ramirez
·4 min read
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Nikki Haley has bowed out of the race for the 2024 Republican nomination after getting destroyed by her rival Donald Trump on Super Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning, Haley announced in a press conference that while she is” filled with gratitude for the outpouring of support we’ve received from all across our great country,” the “time has now come to suspend my campaign.”

“In all likelihood, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee when our party convention meets in July. I congratulate him and wish him well,” she said, stopping short of giving Trump her outright endorsement. “I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee. But on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said ‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.’ It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him. And I hope he does that.”

The former South Carolina governor lost to Trump — who once named Haley his U.N. Ambassador — for a much-needed win in virtually every major primary. She lost to him in Iowa. She lost to him in  New Hampshire, despite pouring vast amounts of resources and advertising dollars into the state. She even lost to him in her home state of South Carolina.

On Super Tuesday, she lost every state but Vermont.

Trump, ever gracious, preempted Haley’s speech with a Truth Social post gloating over his victory and celebrating that “Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion, despite the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont, and various other Republican Primaries.”

“At this point, I hope she stays in the “race” and fights it out until the end! I’d like to thank my family, friends, and the Great Republican Party for helping me to produce, by far, the most successful Super Tuesday in HISTORY, and would further like to invite all of the Haley supporters to join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation,” he added.

Haley’s insistence that she would remain in the race as long as possible to give disaffected voters an alternative to Trump and Biden was visibly at odds with her inability to secure decisive wins. As her fellow GOP hopefuls dropped out — and Republicans pressured her to follow suit — Haley dug in her heels and ramped up her attacks on the former president as an “unhinged and unstable” figure whom many Republicans privately dread despite their public endorsements. Ahead of Super Tuesday, Haley backed away from an RNC pledge she’d made promising to support the eventual Republican nominee.

But Haley’s efforts could not surmount the immovable force that is Trump, who now boasts 995 delegates to Haley’s 89. The math is insurmountable, and along with the exits of fellow candidates Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy from the race, Haley’s departure clears the way for the former president to skate to the Republican nomination virtually unchallenged.

Haley’s campaign stumbled at several points, and her posturing as a moderate Republican forced to battle criticism from her opponents and their supporters accusing her of being a Democrat in GOP costume. Despite once lauding Haley’s work in his administration, Trump employed a scorched earth policy towards his former ambassador in the final weeks of her campaign. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, sources close to the former president described his complaints that Haley was “two-faced,” both praising and attacking him at her own convenience.

“Team Trump smartly used Nikki Haley as a weapon of mass destruction to destroy DeSantis’ coalition, knowing that in the end Haley would never be able to put together a winning coalition in the primary, given all the weaknesses she has on the right,” one source said. Once Haley’s usefulness against DeSantis expired, the Trump campaign transitioned into “wreck-Nikki-Haley mode.”

The final days of Haley’s campaign were defined by direct spats with the former president, who took to leveling racist mockery of Haley in his final bid for the state. Trump’s campaign unveiled HaleyFacts.com, in December, using the website to describe Haley as a “threat from within.”

“Nikki Haley is using radical Democrat money to run the radical Democratic campaign operation she’s running,” Trump told supporters during a Sunday night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. “What the hell kind of Republican candidate is that?”

With Haley out of the picture, the former president can now sail through the remainder of the primary season for his expected November rematch with President Joe Biden.

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