Nikki Haley Wants Her Own Voters to Get Off the Fence—and Back Donald Trump

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley addressed her past feud with Donald Trump head-on in her Tuesday night speech at the Republican National Convention. Haley, who served as a United Nations ambassador under Trump’s administration, was met with a mix of cheers and boos as she took the stage.

“My fellow Republicans,” Haley began after smiling in response to her not-so-warm welcome, “President Trump asked me to speak at this convention in the name of unity. It was a gracious invitation and I was happy to accept. I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period.” The crowd gave her a standing ovation. Trump, after a few seconds, joined in.

Just a week ago, Haley wasn’t invited to the RNC, even after releasing all of her 97 delegates to the Trump campaign on Tuesday, months after officially dropping out of the race in March.

Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and one of the only Republican women to ever participate in a presidential debate, used her ten or so minutes on the RNC stage to talk to those who supported her campaign, urging them to shift their votes toward Trump. “We should acknowledge that there are some Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100 percent of the time,” Haley said. “I happen to know some of them.”

“And I want to speak to them tonight,” she continued. “My message to them is simple: You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him. Take it from me; I haven’t always agreed with President Trump.”

Indeed, their disagreements—often deeply personal—dominated the Republican primary.

On the campaign trail, Trump said of Haley, “If you think that birdbrain, I mean Nikki, becomes president,” to laughs from his crowd, “she’s not going to fight like we fight.” Back in January, Trump claimed that Haley “is not capable of doing this job. I know her very well, she’s not tough enough, she’s not smart enough, and she wasn’t respected enough. She cannot do this job.” The former president also critiqued the style of one of Haley’s dresses and mocked her given first name, Nimarata.

Like Trump’s newly announced running mate J.D. Vance, Haley has also had her fair share of negative things to say about the former president. In a July 2023 interview, where Haley vowed to back Trump if he got the nomination, she said, “We can’t have, as Republicans, him as the nominee. He can’t win a general election.” Haley has also referred to Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished,” questioned whether he was “mentally fit” enough for the job, and said that “America can do better” than a nominee who had to pay writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million in defamation damages for lying about sexually assaulting her in the ’90s. “This may be his survival mode to pay his legal fees and get out of some sort of legal peril,” Haley said of Trump’s campaign in February, “but this is like suicide for our country.”

After a will-she-or-won’t-she endorsement drama following the end of her campaign in March, Haley finally committed to supporting her opponent in late May. “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him,” she said. “And I genuinely hope he does.” And in June, the two reportedly shared a call for the first time since she left the race. Haley described it as a “good conversation,” and added that there had been no discussion of a campaign role for her, nor information about her attending the RNC.