Nikki Haley offers her ‘strong endorsement’ of Trump in convention speech

Milwaukee (CNN) — Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign Tuesday night in her Republican National Convention speech, her latest step toward embracing her former rival and unifying the party after their bitter presidential primary.

“I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said Tuesday.

As Trump watched on from the convention center’s VIP suite, Haley used her speech to defend the former president’s foreign policy record and speak directly to voters who disagree with him on certain issues.

“There are some Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time,” she said. “My message to them is simple: You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him.”

Haley’s speech Tuesday capped off a gradual easing of tensions between the former governor and Trump after a bruising, yearlong campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in which Haley urged GOP voters to back her to avoid the “chaos” that she said follows the former president.

Haley, who released her delegates last week and implored them to support Trump, was a late addition to the program. She was invited to appear onstage in Milwaukee only over the weekend, which coincided with the assassination attempt on Trump and the former president’s call for themes of unity at the convention.

Unity between Trump and his former primary rivals was a key theme Tuesday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his speech, which followed Haley’s, to call on Republicans to help elect the former president.

“Donald Trump, he’s been demonized. He’s been sued. He’s been prosecuted. And he nearly lost his life,” DeSantis said. “We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.”

A bitter campaign

After primary losses in New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina, Haley defied calls to drop out and rally around Trump. Instead, she leaned harder into criticisms of the former president and his age.

At campaign events, she frequently pointed out that polls suggested she would be more competitive than Trump against President Joe Biden in a general election matchup and warned that his legal troubles would dominate much of the campaign cycle.

When Haley did end her campaign in early March, the day after Super Tuesday, she did not endorse the former president as primary rivals such as DeSantis had done.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote – those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him. And I hope he does that,” she said in her exit announcement.

But in May, Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said she would vote for the former president, arguing that Biden would be worse for America.

And last week, shortly after she released her delegates to vote for Trump, her former rival said he would “take a look” at inviting her to speak at the convention.

“There was a lot of bad blood there,” Trump told Fox News radio last week. “She stayed too long. She was being soundly defeated at every place, but she just wouldn’t leave.”

Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, told reporters at a Bloomberg event Tuesday afternoon that he thought it was “tremendously important” that Haley would be speaking at the convention.

“We want to talk about unifying the country, and I think that that’s really where the president wants to go, particularly coming out of Saturday,” Whatley said. “So having Ambassador Haley here is very important for us.”

Whatley declined to say when exactly the invitation to speak at the convention had been extended to Haley.

Haley won less than 100 delegates, compared with the more than 2,200 who are bound to Trump, and she won just two primaries, in Vermont and Washington, DC. But in the weeks after dropping out, she continued to receive tens of thousands of votes in primaries, including in key battleground states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania. The Biden campaign has sought to reach Haley’s supporters through television and digital ads in hopes of reminding them of Trump’s insults aimed at their candidate.

Facing the convention crowd

The question now is whether the unity Republicans are projecting at their convention has extended to Haley voters. Some supporters think it will.

“The Nikki Haley voters will come around to Trump,” Katon Dawson, a longtime Haley ally and former South Carolina Republican Party chairman, said before the speech. “It might take a while, but they’ll come.”

Dawson pointed to his own decision to back Trump and argued that, despite Haley’s past criticism of the former president, the country couldn’t handle another four years of Biden.

“She’s doing the right thing,” Dawson said of Haley speaking at the convention.

South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, a convention delegate who backed Trump during the primary, told CNN after Haley spoke that the speech was “exactly what President Trump has been calling for – a message of unity, bringing the party together and growing the party.”

But Tuesday’s crowd also included thousands of Republican Party activists, some of whom told CNN before Haley’s address that they were still wary of her after the primary.

“I have no problem with her speaking tonight, only if she puts her complete support behind President Trump,” said Susan Cheatham, an Arizona delegate who said she thought Haley stayed in the race as long as she did to “discredit and disrupt” Trump’s campaign.

Aaron Farris, an uncommitted delegate from Minnesota – where Haley won nearly 30% of the primary vote – said he voted for Trump but respects the former ambassador’s work at the United Nations.

“Stuff gets said during primaries,” Farris said. “At the end of the day, it’s important that we’re all unified going into November.”

Julia Black, another South Carolina delegate, said she supported Haley when she led the state but always planned to vote for Trump in the primary. The criticisms the former governor previously leveled at Trump were just a normal part of politics, she said.

“Who won?” Black said. “Politicians. They say what they’ve got to say.”

This story and headline have been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.

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