GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Sunday she “absolutely” trusts the jury in E. Jean Carroll defamation case against former President Trump but that the recent ruling should not bar him from the ballot.
“I absolutely trust the jury. And I think that they made their decision based on the evidence. I just don’t think that should take him off the ballot,” Haley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I think the American people will take him off the ballot. I think that’s the best way to go forward, is not let him play the victim. Let him play the loser. That’s what we want him to do at the end of the day,” the former United Nations ambassador continued.
On Friday, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million for defaming Carroll in 2019 when he denied the writer’s accusation he sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s. Trump said he will appeal the verdict. Earlier, a separate jury found the former president liable for sexual abuse in a defamation trial last year with Carroll over a separate comment and ordered him to pay $5 million.
That’s the only reason the RNC hasn’t already formally thrown Trump their undivided support like they did in 2020, which had the effect of canceling GOP primaries, IMO.
The RNC is being forced to wait, literally, for the courts to decide multiple issues or they’d have called for Trump already, just like they did in 2020 – which Haley is strangely refraining from mentioning these days, as though it never happened.
I think it’s safe to assert that if the RNC had even a scrap of a guarantee that Trump will survive his multiple legal consequences this year, they absolutely already would have declared for Trump, and Haley would be just as screwed today as Bill Weld, Mark Sanford, and Joe Walsh were four years ago.
Funny how she keeps forgetting that. I guess it was okay when it was other GOP presidential candidates getting fucked by their own party.
They threw their support behind him in 2020 because he was the incumbent. Same as the DNC did with Biden this time.
It may seem that way, but it’s a bit more complex than that, and it is neither automatic nor guaranteed unless no one else of the same party runs against the incumbent.
The national conventions make a new call every time on who to support, both RNC and DNC: not at the same point in the primary schedule, but instead whenever they think they have their winner. Some years that doesn’t happen prior to the National Convention itself, and the candidate is actually declared at the convention instead of beforehand via the primaries. These days it’s usually the primaries, but it can still go all the way to being decided at the convention. If the party throws support to a single candidate very early, as they did in 2020, it has the effect of ending the campaigns of everyone else in that party for that presidential election.
In 2020 there were several viable GOP non-Trump candidates running for the GOP presidential ticket, and that’s exactly where Nikki Haley is now. She’s not an also-ran; she actually has a sizeable fraction of the primary votes so far, though it is still just that: a fraction.
But Nikki Haley is terrified that’s exactly what the RNC is going to do to her, call it for Trump before Super Tuesday on March 5. That would not end her campaign in itself, but several state caucuses would simply not hold primaries for that election (why spend the money if the winner is already chosen?) so all those states automatically go to whoever the national convention supports, and there’s no way for a candidate to win against all that. That’s what happened in 2020.
The problem isn’t her viability as much as it is the split down the party itself, and she’s right to be terrified. But she’s also a fucking hypocrite for it, because she had nothing to say in 2020 when the RNC did it to others in her own position now.
The RNC does not think it has its winner yet, but NOT because Nikki Haley presents any threat to Trump. It’s because Trump presents a threat to Trump that they can’t give him the GOP ticket yet.
TL;DR: For all intents and purposes, as far as the RNC is concerned, Trump IS running as an incumbent, but they can’t call it for him because of his legal issues. If he gets thrown off the ballot or into jail, what do they do for a candidate then?