Former rival of Donald Trump for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley strongly endorsed him at the Republican National Convention. The former South Carolina governor exited the race in March.
During her speech she encouraged the skeptics to vote for him in November and it was a show of party unity.
“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,” said Haley at the convention on July 16.
She said Republicans should put aside their differences and rally behind their nominees saying that a unified party would ‘save’ the country.
Haley is seen as a hypocrite by many as she said that she wouldn’t run against Trump if he decided to run for a second term and yet she did exactly that. She called him a bully who threw temper tantrums and he in turn called her ‘bird brain’.
After all that mudslinging, Haley has now joined in to ‘strongly endorse’ Trump as she says in her speech. And they were some boos in the crowd too although many also applauded her.
“Too little, too late,” said one person in the Illinois delegation on her call to unite. Another point of interest is that Haley was only invited to speak at the last minute. She was added to the lineup on the day of Trump’s attempted assasination. She spoke just before her other rival who also ran against Trump as nominee earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
She had said in her speech, “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. But we agree more than we disagree. We agree on keeping America strong. We agree on keeping America safe. And we agree that Democrats have moved so far to the left that they’re putting our freedoms in danger.”
“To my fellow Republicans: We must not only be a unified party, we must also expand our party. We are so much better when we are bigger. We are stronger when we welcome people into our party who have different backgrounds and experiences. And right now we need to be strong to save America.”
Trump, whose ear was in a bandage from the bullet that grazed his ear a few days ago during his attempted assassination, watched her speech with a strange expression and pursed his lips the whole time but did laugh at some of her jokes on their disagreements.
Haley backed Florida Sen Marco Rubio in the 2016 GOP primary and then went on to serve in Trump’s administration as his ambassador to the United Nations.