Former 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley drew criticism from cable news outlets over her speech at the Republican National Convention, specifically regarding her past opinions on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Haley’s speech at the convention, delivered about four months after she suspended her campaign, sought to unify the Republican Party ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The address and her reiteration of her endorsement of Trump prompted MSNBC’s Morning Joe to air a series of clips in which she previously criticized Trump, including one in January when she called Trump “unhinged” and another in February when she said she felt “no need to kiss the ring.”
“It’s quite an image last night, quite a tableau that we’re seeing there in Milwaukee where Donald Trump walks into the hall, sits there, and watches this parade of candidates who criticized him in very, very personal ways, calling him perhaps ‘a suicide mission,’ as she put it in the Wall Street Journal, for the country if he’s reelected,” Willie Geist said on Morning Joe. “Saying he’s unhinged, saying he’s diminished, all of these things, watching them come to heel and to support Donald Trump, and in the case of Nikki Haley … the hope of the Trump campaign is that she can bring with her those people who were skeptical of Donald Trump, perhaps some of those suburban women who will decide the election.”
Political analyst Claire McCaskill, a former senator from Missouri, also appeared on Morning Joe, and she said it is “so much more humiliating” for Haley and other people supporting Trump, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), citing “the depth for their dislike” for the former president. McCaskill also questioned why it is still called the Republican Party, as it is now “the Trump party.”
“There’s nothing Republican about it,” McCaskill said. “All of the legs of the Ronald Reagan stool that stood for Republicanism, that Joe Scarborough could speak to much more eloquently than I could, they’re gone. They’re all gone. There’s nothing left of the ideology of the Republican Party. It is now about a guy, one guy, and his ability to market and the power of his personality to speak to grievance. It’s not any more complicated than that.”
Meanwhile, CNN’s coverage of Haley’s speech was less critical of the former Trump rival. Host Kasie Hunt hosted a roundtable discussion on the speech, which included Karen Finney, a former spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Finney argued that issues facing voters have not changed ahead of the election and doubted that Haley’s speech shifted anyone else to the other side.
President Joe Biden’s campaign issued its own response to Haley’s speech, noting how she argued that a person who “surrounds himself in chaos” cannot be president. The campaign statement contended that is why people will vote against Trump in November.
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Haley mentioned in her speech that Trump asked her to speak at the convention “in the name of unity” and that she was happy to accept. It comes after Trump revealed to the Washington Examiner that he rewrote his speech for Thursday night after he survived an assassination attempt, with the new version focusing on unity.
DeSantis also spoke during Tuesday night’s round of speeches, during which he joked that the United States “cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency,” a reference to the 1989 film.
