Nikki Haley Betrays President Trump

ABC News reported: 

Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Donald Trump's administration, said the former president "has let us down," her first public break from him since the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Haley, who is also widely considered a leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, made her decisive comments to Politico's Tim Alberta in a Jan. 12 interview that was published Friday.

Politico had the story here: 

At the time of Haley’s call, Donald Trump—her “friend”—had spent much of the previous month refusing to concede defeat in an election he clearly lost, opting instead to delegitimize the institutions of government that upheld the result, indulge in outlandish conspiracy theories and generally subvert the country’s 244-year-old democratic norms. Republican leaders who possessed the credibility to dispute these claims publicly and exert a counterinfluence over the GOP electorate had chosen not to. Haley was among those who kept quiet.

For the previous four years, since being plucked from the governorship of South Carolina to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Haley had navigated the Trump era with a singular shrewdness, messaging and maneuvering in ways that kept her in solid standing both with the GOP donor class as well as with the president and his base. She maintained a direct line to Trump, keeping private her candid criticisms of him, while publicly striking an air of detached deference. Upon her resignation in 2018, the New York Times editorial page praised Haley as “that rarest of Trump appointees: one who can exit the administration with her dignity largely intact.”

“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”

This was the most certainty I’d heard from any Republican in the aftermath of January 6. And Haley wasn’t done.

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” she said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

But do rank-and-file Republicans feel the same way? I told Haley about recent polling shared with me, showing his approval ratings in deep red districts hadn’t flinched.