FROM OUR REPORTER
PALM BEACH (FLORIDA) – “It's time to pause my campaign.” After a year of fighting for the Republican nomination for the White House, Nikki Haley is retreating with a short speech in her city of Charleston.
But for now, she's not supporting Trump, the president who appointed her UN ambassador and whose bitter rival she has become: She says the votes she won could make the difference in November – and she's not talking just above that, two victories in Vermont and Washington DC (historic for a Republican candidate for the White House), but above all the significant percentages she achieved in primaries where she lost (like Michigan, but she still snagged 300,000 votes in a key state). It's an anti-Trump vote that “is now up to him to deserve.” And I hope he does.
Best wishes to Trump (but no support)
Haley is putting herself in a position of power: She will not run as an independent, leaving the door open for future support for Trump. He realizes that his rival will soon be the candidate for the nomination. «I congratulate him and wish him all the best. Just as I would wish for anyone who could become our president.” On the other hand, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, who has never hidden his contempt for the attack on Congress on January 6th and opposing ideas, has also given him credit who made foreign policy, gave his approval yesterday. The words with which he withdrew from the Republican leadership in the Senate are also telling: “I have many shortcomings, but one of them is a lack of understanding of politics.”
Bird brain
The first question is what Trump will do. Before Haley spoke, the former president wrote on the social network Truth that he had “torn her to pieces” in the primaries and attributed her rival's successes to the fact that in some states “we don't know why” there are open primaries which the Democrats are represented can also vote and receive financial support from “left-wing radical donors”. But in another message, his campaign is calling on voters to “unite against Joe Biden.”
After a year of bloody campaigning between the two, Nikki Haley, who Trump nicknamed “Bird Brain,” is seen by many of the former president's fans not as a “real conservative” but as an agent of Democrats and the military industry who want the wars to continue , although you explain that you want to avoid them by defending your allies and opposing Putin. We asked Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, an advocate of Trumpism, if she would consider adding Haley to a possible Trump administration: “I see no reason for that and would fight to do so both publicly and privately avoid,” she told Corriere on the sidelines of Tuesday's party at Mar-a-Lago. If, after the primaries, many campaigns are changing their message to “moderate” them in search of the crucial suburban electorate for the general election, the Trump team is showing no signs of doing so at the moment.
Biden holds out his hand
So the second question is: Who will Haley voters choose? We met them at his rallies in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina: Democrats and independents, but also Republicans who have voted for Trump in the past. According to a Quinnipiac poll, half of them would vote for Trump, but 37% would vote for Biden. Who wastes no time and extends his hand: “We won’t agree on everything, but we will agree on democracy, mutual respect, NATO and Putin.”