Haley pledges to stay in race, feels ‘no need to kiss the ring’
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Days away from a heated Republican primary on her home turf, Nikki Haley pushed back Tuesday against skeptics who have long urged her to drop out of the race, saying that while other members of her party had given into a “herd mentality” and fallen in line behind former President Donald Trump, she would not.
“I feel no need to kiss the ring,” she said in a speech in Greenville, pledging to continue her pursuit of the nomination past Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, her home state. “And I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him.”
Haley also contended that many of the same Republican politicians “who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him” and were “too afraid” to speak up, despite knowing that he had been “a disaster” for the party.
She argued that Americans deserved a choice and not a “Soviet-style election,” which she described as only one candidate drawing 99% of the vote.
“We don’t anoint kings in this country,” she said. “We have elections. And Donald Trump, of all people, should know we don’t rig elections.”
The remarks were among her sharpest yet against Trump and the way he has remade the Republican Party in his image.
After taking a calibrated approach toward Trump for much of the race, Haley has assumed a more combative stance as she became his last major rival.
But Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador during Trump’s administration, is trailing her former boss in the Palmetto State by double digits.
In a memo emailed to his supporters Tuesday, Trump, who for months fueled lies that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him, suggested that Haley was “like any wailing loser hellbent on an alternative reality” and that she had been “rejected by those who know her the best” in South Carolina.
To questions about when she will leave the race, Haley keeps reiterating her promise to stay in through Super Tuesday, on March 5, regardless of the outcome Saturday.
Some of her closest allies have not ruled out the possibility that she could stay in longer.
Her campaign has continued to collect money from top-dollar donors and to announce elected officials, business leaders and prominent community members who are helping lead the operation’s efforts across the country, including in Alaska, California, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Washington.
On Tuesday, she echoed a forceful response to her detractors that she has incorporated into her stump speech in recent days, suggesting that a majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch between Trump, 77, and President Joe Biden, 81.
“The truth is, Americans already know what Joe Biden and Donald Trump will do,” Haley, 52, said. “They’re dividers at a time when America desperately, urgently, needs a uniter.”