Trump can’t trust Nikki Haley as vice president
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Even though Nikki Haley officially dropped out of the presidential race over two months ago, her campaign has had a protracted afterlife. Despite not campaigning at all, she got over 20 per cent of the vote in Indiana’s presidential primary last week, and she has scheduled events with top donors this week. There has also been a behind-the-scenes effort to get Donald Trump to consider the former South Carolina governor as his vice-presidential nominee.
Trump himself has now announced that Haley is definitively not under consideration. However, Haley’s undead presidential campaign indicates deeper structural challenges facing Republicans.
Throughout much of the Republican primary, Haley trained her fire on Trump’s rivals, especially Florida governor Ron DeSantis. However, in the closing weeks of the campaign, she lifted the banner of anti-Trumpism in order to try to rally Trump-skeptical suburbanites and the national press corps to her cause. This pivot against Trump dovetailed with her more technocratic and anti-populist policy message, which emphasised entitlement reform, the expansion of legal immigration, and foreign-policy interventionism. This policy program helped lower Haley’s electoral ceiling in a populism-infused GOP, but it also drew a clear contrast with the former president.
Both Trump and Haley have political incentives to mend fences. Trump obviously wants to claim victory in November, and he could benefit from tapping Haley’s donor network as well as from appealing to her voters. Haley seems to hope to continue to be active in Republican politics. She has recently been named to a prestigious chair at the Hudson Institute, one of the top foreign-policy shops, and may be considering another run for the presidency in 2028 and beyond. So far, she seems to be avoiding the “burn the GOP to the ground” mantra of some Trump critics.
Even if Republicans aim to court the suburban vote, though, Haley might still face long odds as a VP pick. Trump has insisted over and over again that he wants a “loyal” vice president, and Haley’s criticisms are still fresh. Moreover, Haley’s past comments on entitlements could easily become fodder for Democratic attacks in the general election – similar to the way that Paul Ryan’s entitlement proposals became one of the central issues of the 2012 campaign once he was chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate.
Haley served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and some of her allies may hope that she could play another foreign-policy role in a second Trump administration. Here, the divisions between Trump and the former Republican establishment may not be as great as they sometimes appear in the press. For instance, Trump didn’t mobilise against the recent Ukraine-funding bill, and he helped protect Speaker Mike Johnson against Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempted coup. Long invested in foreign policy, Haley may see advantages in building political bridges with a thoroughly transactional Trump.
Republicans are still smarting from the 2022 midterms, when poor performance among college-educated voters turned a “red wave” into a mirage. Many Republican observers think the party needs to be on guard against a similar disappointment in 2024, and some view Haley’s continued performance in the primaries as a warning sign. Yes, some Haley voters are Democrats who simply can’t pass up another chance to pull the lever against Trump – and, yes, Biden’s deteriorating approval rating means that even some Trump skeptics might vote to eject the incumbent president in November. But the GOP nevertheless may benefit from suburban outreach, and the party hopes to patch up its internal divisions heading into the general election.
