Haley declines to affirm she will support Trump if he wins nomination

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign event at Irmo Town Park on Feb. 17, 2024, in Irmo, S.C.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined Sunday to affirm that she would support former President Donald Trump if he were to become the GOP nominee for president again.

Speaking to host Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week,” the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador said multiple times that her sole concern is defeating Trump in the Republican primary.

“I’m running against him because I don’t think he should be president,” she said. “The last thing on my mind is who I’m going to support. The only thing on my mind is how we’re going to win this.”

When Karl tried to pin down Haley, she declined to say one way or the other.

“I’m going to run and I’m going to win, and y’all can talk about support later. Right now you can ask him if he’s going to support me when I’m the nominee,” she said.

In the past, Haley has said she would support Trump if he wins the GOP nomination.

“I would support him because I am not going to have a President Kamala Harris. We can’t afford that. That is not going to happen,” she said on CNBC in July 2023. At the first GOP debate in August, Haley was one of the contenders who raised their hands to say she would back Trump (who was not at the debate) if he emerged from the primary process as the nominee. Even as she has ratcheted up her criticism of Trump during the campaign season, she has not directly reversed her position on that matter.

During the interview with Karl, Haley was sharply critical of President Joe Biden for the state of the world today, but also aimed her fire at Trump, particularly for his recent remarks that were seen as undermining the NATO alliance as well as his attempts to stock the leadership of the Republican National Committee with close allies, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law.

“It should be a wake-up call for Republicans all over this country,” Haley told Karl. “I mean, you look at the fact that we saw in his campaign reports that he used $50 million of campaign contributions to pay for his personal court cases. Then he tried to get the RNC to name him the presumptive nominee. We don’t anoint kings in America.”

The next Republican primary is to be held in South Carolina, Haley’s home state, on Feb. 24.

Sunday’s interview was something of a greatest hits collection for Haley, featuring many of her current leading lines of attack against the former president, particularly when it comes to what Trump has said (or not said) about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose leading foe Alexei Navalny unexpectedly died last week, a death that much of the world is assuming was ordered by Putin.

“We need to remind the American people that Vladimir Putin is not our friend,” she said. “Vladimir Putin is not cool. This is not someone we want to associate with. This is not someone that we want to be friends with. This is not someone that we can trust. And so when you hear Donald Trump say in South Carolina a week ago that he would encourage Putin to invade our allies if they weren’t pulling their weight, that’s bone-chilling, because all he did in that one moment was empower Putin.”

She also noted that Trump has been silent on the matter of Navalny’s death.

“Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that — that Putin killed one of his political opponents — or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal. Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem,” she said.